The following is a twisted reality that we live in Venezuela where anarchy reigns and there are no laws that anyone complies with in relation to the prices of goods.
Hyperinflation, dollarization and informal reconversion are some of the issues I mentioned before, but perhaps this is the worst of all.
When the citizen goes out to buy any product for his daily food or other things, he finds that the prices fixed in dollars are not really what he will pay, because while it is true that there is an official dollar whose rate is given by the BCV and several parallel ones that are published in different web pages, all without respecting the legal variants regarding the real calculation of the national currency, there is an even worse one that has no electronic or physical supports but is invented by the merchant to apply an excessive usury, I call it the speculative dollar.
The trader justifies the fact that the dollar price he calculates is based on trends and that it is to protect his investment, since the suppliers charge him that way, a gross lie since when the trend is downward, they do not lower the products.
An example for the reader to understand, if someone is going to buy 1 kilo of sugar whose cost stipulated by the seller is 1 dollar, the seller calculates the price by adding 100 thousand and even more bs to the dollar that is at the maximum price.
In other words, if the Dollar Today page is at that moment the page that places the dollar at the highest price that day and it is at 1,900,000 bs then the merchant sells the sugar at 2 million or more, but if the following day the U.S. currency drops to 1,800,000 he keeps the price placed the day before with the excuse that he bought the item when the dollar was more expensive and if he sells it at a lower price he would lose.
In this speculative dollar business, all the parties involved in the commercialization chain and those who supervise it are involved; the victim is the buyer, who is defenseless against abuses, since the entities that should be in charge of protecting him are among the beneficiaries, or at least its members, of this barbaric practice.
Another variant of this speculative dollar is applied depending on the type of payment made, if it is in cash, which is 90% improbable, then they give a minimum discount to the client, since they will resell those bills earning 100%, which multiplies the profits, if it is done by point of sale must pay an extra in bolivars and if it is done in dollars then they receive it at the lowest rate or at the price they buy it, which is 50% less.
It is a machine of speculation and usury that squeezes the little that Venezuelans have left.