Losses and profits. Will the baguette one day be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as France proposed to the UN agency in March? While waiting for this planetary consecration, its price agitates the spirits. And everything starts from the Chicago Board of Trade, where the price of wheat has risen sharply since September, at the same time making flour more expensive. If we add the additional costs of electricity and gas, and a pinch of increase in the minimum wage and packaging, this bread of about 250 grams, which is the national pride, should register an increase of 5 to 10 cents euro at the bakers, when they have not already decided.
At 89 cents, on average, the price of the basic baguette is close to the 1 euro bar. We are not there, assure the professionals, who sometimes negotiate with the millers a smoothing of the increases in flour, while waiting for a decrease in the raw material. “I don’t know of a baker who increases the price of the baguette by 20 cents, says the president of the National Confederation of French bakery and pastry, Dominique Anract, in an interview with Agence France-Presse. There is no need to panic. “
A problem of feeling
We do not joke, however, with the baguette, in a country where we nibble 320 per second. It is not only a national emblem, like the rooster or the beret, but also the measure – felt – of inflation. Wrongly. Because its price has not soared, after the switch from the franc to the euro in 2001, even if it still climbed 25% until the financial crisis of 2008. With 23 cents over twenty years, the increase is only 35%, a little higher than the price index (+ 30%), calculated experts from INSEE. A contained increase, which owes a lot to supermarkets. It takes almost two minutes less work to buy a baguette than it did forty years ago, when it cost the equivalent of 0.25 euros.
If a majority of French people complain that “Everything increases” and if purchasing power is emerging as the dominant theme of the presidential campaign, it is above all that pre-committed expenses (rents, telecoms, insurance, etc.) represent a growing share of household income: a third on average, but 61% for the poorest households, against 21% for the better-off. It is on the basis of the remainder of living, the arbitrable income making it possible to finance other expenses, that they experience a deterioration in their purchasing power. The increase in the price of the sacrosanct wand amplifies this feeling without changing the situation.