RATIN

Weighing Scales, Measures Challenges

Posted on December, 9, 2016 at 09:43 am


OFTEN, fuel and mealie-meal price hikes with the latter being a staple food in the country raise hue and cry.

But the same commodity pre-packed in smaller quantities begins to open the window of deceit wider on closer scrutiny.

Still, the practice spreads its tentacles to other traditional foods that form a recipe for local cuisine.

Caterpillar, a creeping insect caught off trees in some forests of the hinterland, goes by local names of Ifishimu or Ifinkubala north of the country.

Stacks of the insect are packed in sacks and prices fixed at source.Finkubala pickers sometimes obtain the commodity by barter.

Some buy detergent, cooking oil, bars of soap, and other urban items in exchange for the insects.

Elsewhere, Vinkubala (Nyanja) in Eastern and in Lusaka respectively form a pointer to the weighing scales and measures challenge seemingly beyond the Zambia Bureau of Standards (ZABS) scope.

The latter organisation is commonplace on matters of commercial measuring devices like supermarket scales and so on.

However, this treatise is not about the ZABS perfectionist crusade but merely incidental to the topic in focus because at Soweto Market for instance, there appears to be no standards to discuss!

This is because when one gets to the marketplace, a heap of caterpillar is measured and packed in smaller plastic packages using a disused can that is cut in half and filled with the commodity.

One heap is hauled into a four-litre plastic container which usually turns out to be a discarded container of some detergent or edible oil.This container popularly known as 'Meda' is used as a leverage for packaging other commodities like tomatoes, beans, sardines, onion, carrots, green pepper and a wide variety of other edibles forming local cuisine.

'Meda' containers vary in size just like prices and the larger the vessel, the more expensive the quantity packed.

Practice seems to have standardised countrywide and one would aptly conclude this was the agreed mode of sale by consensus.

At a glance, the informal sector marketing scenario appears not to rely on official weights and measures but determination of value by the eye.

Whatever one sells, they determine by conjecture and some abstract calculation method to arrive at the price that would give them a profit margin.

Conjecture is the process of assimilation, judgement or assessment, which at the same time combines analysis, evaluation and conclusion - the final value.

The articulation of conjecture is more prevalent in literature and uses a series of art forms that promote believability or plausibility (possibility).

This method applies to goods ranging from factory made merchandise to second-hand articles which have proved to be a hit on the contemporary marketing scene.

In the townships, the trend runs riot with commercial goods like cookers or television sets sold as if they are stolen.

A typical example is when a seller of such an item encounters an emergency.

 

Source:allafrica