Economics
Turkish Police Are Fighting Inflation by Checking Toothpaste Prices at Grocery Stores
- Municipal police teams have been busy inspecting market prices
- Turkish consumer and producer inflation jumped after lira drop
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Their toolkit is no match for the central bank’s, but after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made repeated calls for a crackdown on price hikes, Turkey’s municipal police are on the frontlines of its war on inflation.
On a sunny October morning in Gungoren, a working class Istanbul neighborhood and a stronghold of Erdogan’s Justice & Development Party, members of the zabita, as they are known in Turkish, were paying surprise visits to supermarkets in their van, perusing the shelves and issuing warnings to shop managers suspected of price-gouging.