A Selling Society

Everyone here is selling something.  I don’t mean this in any deep metaphorical sense, literally everyone is selling something.  On Friday, my market day, you can find everyone you know from work and around town camped out somewhere in the market selling their wares.  I am no longer surprised to have a colleague, such as a nurse or medical assistance, shout hello to me from their stand as I pass though doing my own shopping.  From the farmers, nurses, to my landlord, and my host-family’s uncle—a director at a cement factory, everyone is selling. 

The products they are selling do not tend to be unique.  Few of the products are local or made by anyone selling the goods.  Even much of the food products (in spite of the predominant profession in Togo being farmer) are shipped in from elsewhere.  From speaking with an acquaintance I know that many of these vendors make a weekly pilgrimage down to Lomé to buy whatever random merchandise to resell at our local market and around town.  Some people tend to specialize; you have cloth dealers, those who sell spices, onions, tomatoes, pots and pans, etc. But almost all the products are identical.

I live in a city with one of the largest markets in Togo and you can find most of anything you want.  We have hundreds of people selling goods, but they are all selling exactly the same things.  For the dozen cloth sellers, they all sell the same cloth—probably all from the same supplier.  The same is true with those selling plastic wares and packaged food products.  All these goods come from the same places are of exactly the same quality, and all the same price, the choice isn’t the product, but which of the twenty vendors will you buy it from?

I can find hardly any specialization in the market here.  Few people offer unique products that you can’t easily walk ten feet and buy with someone else.  Maybe I am limited in my capacity to grasp this idea, but if thirty women buy a basket of tomatoes from the same vendor in order to sell them all at the same place, how can anyone really succeed in turning a profit? 

In the US I have on occasion despaired in how much of a service industry country we have become, but I have a greater appreciation for its effectiveness when compared to the system here.  I cannot claim to know all the intricacies of the economic system here, but it just seems inefficient and impractical for the general population.  These local vendors all purchase from the same suppliers in Lomé, padding the pockets of the few people who actually make products (most not from Togo) and sell these goods for a profit of probably only a few cents. 

Just as with the subsistence farming that is the basis of most of the lives of Togolese, this method of reselling goods provides enough to live on but not much else.