Tirana Times
Over the past week, small business owners took to the streets, demanding the government change a decision that forces them to purchase proper cash registers.
At issue, they say, is not that they don’t want to be part of a properly-taxed sales system. They are angry that the cash register equipment costs too much, around 500 euros, and that the government has been milking them out of hefty fines for not buying the cash registers, which they say they don’t want to pay for.
Now a common occurrence in large supermarkets, the cash registers have failed to penetrate in the smallest of the country’s businesses, and consecutive governments have failed to set in place proper mechanisms to do so.
The first cash registers were installed in the mid-90s, but as is often the case in Albania with good laws and good intentions, they were never fully implemented, and the machines gathered dust for more than a decade.
To add insult to injury, the sale of the cash registers was made an exclusive right of only two companies which are selling them at rates that are too high by international standards.
In reality, in places like Italy cash registers cost around 40 euros – and the authorities come install themselves. What makes the case of the cash registers so ironic in Albania is that because of this exclusive agreement, fair competition was not applied to companies that are supposed to build the very basic infrastructure on which a legal economy is built.
And when the government stifles competition, it leads to higher prices, poorer Albanians, less profitable businesses – unless you have political support. Then the question we might want to ask is – Is Albania a capitalist state?
“It is really hard to say to what extent today’s Albania is a capitalist state, if one thinks of competition not only in the political realm, but in the economic realm too,” says Albert Rakipi of the Albanian Institute for International Studies.
At the end of the day, if Albania wants to be a truly capitalist country it must do more than simply pay lip service to competition. How about starting with something as iconic to a fully a developed economy as a small-business cash registers.
Unprepared for the massive protests, the government backed down and said it would refund the costs of the machines to businesses who install the cash registers when they file their taxes. In essence, the government – or better said, Albania’s taxpayers – will be paying for these overprices machines – with the money still ending up in the pockets of companies who set these high prices to begin with.
The opposition says this deal stinks of corruption. But then the opposition says that for almost everything the government does. What matters most are the perceptions and the effects that issues like the cash registers have on common Albanians.
So, in Albania’s coffee shops, people sit down and try to reason out who actually benefits from the purchase of the overprices cash registers that faced a non-competitive bid process. Where is the political backing? Who is pocketing some of the money?
These are questions Albanians often ask about a company making inroads in other areas of the economy too, but in the case of the cash registers, the irony is almost too much to bear.
