Business leaders warn that cost of living in B.C. could get worse
B.C.’s inflation rate in March year-over-year was 2.5 per cent, and some business leaders are warning that it could get worse in the months to come.
According to StatsCan inflation data, this increase (up B.C.’s 1.7 per cent inflation rate in February) is due to a surge in energy prices, particularly gasoline, caused by war in the Middle East.
In a release, David Gens, the CEO and founder of Merchant Growth, warned that prices in B.C. are likely to get higher in the coming months.
“When energy costs go up, we see the credit behaviour change within weeks. Small business owners start drawing on lines of credit not to grow, but to cover the same operating costs they were managing out of revenue three months ago. That shift is a warning sign most economic indicators don’t catch in time.”
B.C. businesses have dealt with a number of hits over the past several years, including COVID, the decline in the housing market, the trade war, and the current energy crisis.
“What makes this moment particularly difficult is that many of these businesses already drew down their financial cushion recovering from the pandemic, and they haven’t had a long enough stable period to rebuild it. So when costs spike again, there’s no buffer to absorb the first hit,” said Gens.
He said that “a sustained energy-driven inflation spike” forces business owners to choose between raising prices and losing customers, or keeping prices the same but “eroding the business from within.”
Hashem Aboulhosn, the chief growth officer at Merchant Growth, told Daily Hive Urbanized they conducted a survey that found that over half of small businesses plan to increase their prices in the coming months.
At the beginning of the trade war, he said that many businesses chose to absorb the higher costs of inputs.
“But more recently, that was less or no longer feasible, and so businesses basically ended up needing to pass along those costs to consumers. And that survey was really done before this most recent energy crisis,” he said.
“I suspect that with these energy costs, that’s going to happen much more quickly than we saw with the trade war.”
Ultimately, Aboulhosn said that prices will depend on how long the conflict in the Middle East continues.
“A big part of it is inflation expectations. And so if everyone expects that this war will end soon, then you might not see a big reaction,” he explained.
“But if it does go on for a long time, and if people expect this disruption to be significant, then I think that you’re going to see it start to creep into all elements of costs in B.C., because energy … is a fundamental input into just everything that we do.”