The riddle of shopping before getting salaries and bonuses: what money Russians buy everything with

Salaries, bonuses and bonuses have not been paid yet, and people are sweeping away everything that comes to hand. Where does the money come from, Zina?

Yelena Ivanova, Natalia Seibil

In Moscow supermarkets and malls - an emergency. The same chaos on the roads and entrances to shops, moreover, to any. Those who yesterday, as well as the previous days, decided to go to the center in their own vehicles, regretted it ten times. Traffic jams of 10 points are the December norm. To the malls where groceries are sold, queues for parking.

Purchases are like on the last day.

If someone decided to replace the car, he will not be able to please himself before the New Year. The queue at the salons - from three months or more, regardless of the cost of the car.

My friend sold her inherited piece of land and decided to buy a small cottage. There was no money for a big one and close to Moscow, I was looking for an inexpensive one in the neighboring Kaluga region. For two months she got up and went to bed with an open real estate portal on her phone. As soon as new offers appeared, she immediately began to call. From the polite "Oh, just posted a deposit" or "Sorry, already sold" to the usual "We got it all already" - in this range, she received only rejections.

There are crowds of people in ALL shops. Try to buy some gadgets, from iPhones to headphones - be sure to stand in line. In grocery stores, they revive like in the early 90s, except that there are many times more goods.

What happened to fellow citizens, and where did they get their money? Every year in a row, all economists say that the real disposable expenditures of the population have been falling for 10 years already. The impoverishment of the population is evident, especially in families with children. If so, then where did these crowds come from, and why are they spending millions, if not billions, on whatever they see? Salaries at work have not yet been paid. Bonuses and bonuses have not been transferred to cards either. Where do people get so much money to buy everything that comes to hand?

Economists say the boom in demand is primarily due to inflation, which is why people spend savings. Of course, people who can barely make ends meet do not burst into malls and supermarkets. Their lot is an extra couple of kilograms of buckwheat.

- In other categories, the classic effect of inflation is manifested - money burns hands. People who have some kind of savings and see that money is melting before our eyes, that it will not be better in the near future, are trying to buy something at existing prices, at least somehow fix the possibility of buying. To change the car in time is to somehow save money, or buy an apartment and rent it out. Everything will rise in price under inflation, - says Mikhail Belyaev, financial analyst at Rambler.

The economist calls the current situation extremely dangerous. Buying cars and real estate is a defensive investment, which means that inflation moves into a new quality:

- A week ago I had to deal with figures calculated by a group of very reliable people-economists, which show that food inflation for some goods reaches 30% -50% and more. I'm talking about food inflation. Butter, buckwheat, cucumbers - 127%. Potatoes last year on the market cost 40 rubles, this year - 80 rubles a kilogram. Some items in the group of food products have risen in price by 100%, but on average - 30% -50%. This is already hyperinflation. It is dangerous because it is already beginning to break the reproductive proportions of the entire economy. And it is very difficult to cope with it.

Yes, they rushed to buy, but not everything and not everything, says economist Igor Nikolaev . Suburban real estate is actively bought, as are cars and luxury goods. During the pandemic, a large effective demand has formed:

- Still, in 2020, millions of not the poorest people did not travel abroad. And now they are also limited in these possibilities. As for Europe - for sure. Billions of dollars and euros remained unspent. Accordingly, they are looking for where to invest this money.

Last year, real incomes of the population fell by 3%, but this year sociologists note a small plus. This is easy to explain - hundreds of millions of rubles were pumped into the economy, including through one-time payments. According to forecasts, real incomes of the population this year will grow by 2.5%, and salaries will grow by 7% - 8%, - Igor Nikolaev emphasizes.

There is still a rise in wages in Russia. But there are even more debts

Wage growth is a relatively new phenomenon in the labor market. The pandemic has become a catalyst for labor shortages. There are not enough workers, and there is a doubly shortage of good workers. Therefore, employers are forced to raise wages in order to retain the old and attract new forces.

In an atmosphere of instability and fear, people take loans, and then they go for walks. The credit load in the country is approaching 24 trillion rubles, and the overdue one - 8 trillion rubles, recalls entrepreneur and economist Dmitry Potapenko . He calls the desire of compatriots to spend what they borrowed as behavior according to the principle of "Burned out shed, burn and hut":

- It will never be different with us: people do not know how to handle finances, they get into any debts. And since we have an eternal trauma, since 1917, trauma to real estate and property ... People want to provide themselves with a "basic need" - a car, an apartment, a summer residence. You can say at least three hundred times, but for a Soviet person, having a car is an indicator that you are alive, you are in status.

There is also one considerable part of the population in Russia, which is not taken into account by any statistics, therefore the state does not know where they got their money from. From 15 to 20 million people are not registered anywhere and it is not clear what they are doing for the authorities. And they actually teach, fix cars, renovate apartments. Mikhail Belyaev says:

- Recently there was a more or less reliable study that self-employed, those who registered and who work legally, earn an average of 60 thousand a month. The money is not overwhelming, but it is not 15-20 thousand. We must assume that the remaining 15 million people who have not registered, but do the same job, their earnings are not lower. We have a large number of people that statistics do not see.

There is great uncertainty in Russian society now. Ruslan Grinberg, the scientific director of the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, calls the mood "a general atmosphere of mild panic", which is caused by various factors. First of all, the pandemic is not over, and each new wave of the virus brings new volatility. Second, talks about a war with Ukraine postpone stability indefinitely:

- International tension and rumors of war are growing very powerfully. I think there is no certainty about the purchasing power of money. It seems that something will happen to the banks, they doubt the possibility of exchanging rubles for currency. It may or may not be. But this is there as a potential threat. It is much better to buy and own than to worry about money.

Dmitry Potapenko even calls the mood panic:

- The authorities are selling fear, the people are buying cars. We have an eternal fear: what is today a piece of paper will turn into dust. It is better to have a car or real estate that is absolutely impossible to sell if something happens, real estate is not a defensive asset and never was. But no matter how much you tell this story with a Russian, he will still say: I will leave the apartment for the children. Not a deposit, not an investment resource, not gold, not a currency. It will definitely be real estate.

And as the booming demand shows, the apartment and the car now come with the coolest mobile phone, two diamond rings and a trip to the Maldives or Turkey. As they say, where ours did not disappear. Let others think about savings. Or, as another Russian proverb says - they did not live richly, there is nothing to start.