Nowadays we live in a country where people who runs business no matter how big or how small their business are, generate more income in an era where food price hike take place.
For example of small business, hawkers who sell "goreng pisang" or fried banana now selling very very small pisang unlike 5 years ago.
Five years ago, we can get a big size goreng pisang, almost your palm size long, now size of it only the size of the length of your finger, but still they count it as one piece. Imagine if one banana they split into 2 pieces and sell 4 pieces for RM1, now they split one banana into 4 pieces and sell 4 pieces of it for RM1. One piece of splited banana become smaller today.
You get my point. You get 2 bananas 5 years ago for RM1, but now you get only 1 banana for RM1. Malaysia got a lot of banana, our tropical land rich in soil is very suitable for banana farming. You can easily see banana tree wherever you travel in Malaysia, even every kilometer on your left or right side of the highway. How come the banana price become very expensive? I hate this situation. Now I really hate goreng pisang hawkers as well. Today is my last day buying goreng pisang. Your goreng pisang now become smaller, and you increase your price, no way!
Now we talk about traditional cookies or kueh. 5 years ago we can still buy 4 or even 5 pieces of kueh for RM1. The size of every kueh even large. Now, we only get 3 pieces of kueh by added 20 cents more, it means RM1.20, it's 40 cents for each unit. In some small town, maybe you can still get 3 pieces of kueh for RM1, but not in KL or Ipoh or any other big cities. I never buy these traditional cookies sell every morning by so many hawkers close to my house.
Now cucur udang (fried cookies with fried shrimp topping) also sell at RM1 for 2 pieces only. With this 2 pieces of cucur udang, you get one small packet of "kuah cili" (chili paste) or "kuah kacang" (bean paste). The color of the paste is very light, you can consider it is full of water and sugar. Sometimes you see the shrimps topping on the cucur but sometimes the shrimps is gone.
The only 2 kind of food that we can still see sale in low price are plain nasi lemak & bihun goreng. Nasi lemak is some kind of traditional local food mainly made with steamed rice and coconut milk. Still got hawker sell plain nasi lemak as low as RM1.20 per piece. Plain nasi lemak here means a small cup size of nasi lemak, plus small amount of sambal ikan bilis (anchovy fish with pounded chili paste), sometimes with small amount of fried anchovy fish, a one-layer cut of cucumber, a one fourth cut of boiled egg and a piece of daun pisang (banana tree leaf) as a wrapper. I don't have any idea why, might be it is because they use cheap polluted santan or fake santan, or they use cheap and low quality rice. But one thing that I can sure is, they use cheap and very low quality anchovy fish, almost zero omega-3 in it. If fried, it's hard to chew in your mouth, people who have no teeth will struggle, it's quite elastic and tough as wire. This is the most popular type of anchovy fish among nasi lemak hawkers. Nasi lemak high in cholesterol and people who eat nasi lemak everyday usually because they want to save money. Eventually they will get heart attack or stroke.
For bihun, we all know that raw bihun is very cheap, you can buy one packet of raw bihun that can produce 20 pieces or more of ready-to-eat bihun at less than RM3. It could generate more income to hawkers if all people eat bihun everyday. Bihun has very low in nutrients and a lot of people don't like to eat bihun. Bihun made from rice powder and it can't make your stomach full.
Now we talk about drinks. Hawkers usually added red color syrup into their watermelon juice drink so it look more attractive and red. Some hawkers added more cucumber than watermelon itself to make more profit. Because cucumber is cheaper, its taste and odor is almost the same like watermelon. Sometimes they cut this watermelon into many pieces and put these pieces in the container (an aquarium look alike for containing water), people who can see this pieces of real watermelon may think that these hawkers sells real watermelon juice. Actually, it only for display purpose, they will never let you have it. The main ingredient in it to make it taste good & delicious is only sugar and colorings. So better be careful when you buy watermelon juice. It maybe a fraud.
The practice of cutting fruits into many pieces and put them in the container is also popular to other fruits drinks, like orange and guava. They fill these drinks with orange coloring to make look like real orange juice, light green color to make it look like real guava juice. In fact, the real guava fruit drink does have very little light green color to no color at all. Some hawkers added cordial drinks into their "real juices" to add more fruity taste. Cordial drinks is made with coloring, conditioner, composed with sugar and water, and very tiny amount of fruit itself. Some cordial drinks may have no fruit at all, but they still claim as fruit drinks with vitamin.
This topic only covers some of the small business activity in Malaysia, topic on the cookies, nasi lemak, light drinks and so on, which these people are now turning their lost to us and bear it into consumers. We don't touch anything about chickens or fishes yet. Maybe, I will discuss about this problem later.
Some people will say I should not blame the hawkers because this is not their fault of the price increase, I should blame the wholesalers. I will say, yes - this the wholesalers fault, but why hawkers increase their price? They only think that this is the great opportunity to make money more than they can earn before via the price hike. Every time the government announce the petrol price hike, they never miss to increase their selling price.
Basically, they do not lost anything if they keep their old price and can still making profit and get more customers. Believe me, the increased of wholesalers price would not making them lost in businesses. Actually, they will lost some of their regular customers like me. Now they teach me how to become very stingy person. If they forget to return the change, even 5 cents, I will ask.
