Stan Ophorst owns Cafeteria Ophorst in Sprang-Capelle in Brabant. In September, he paid another 1,200 euros for his gas and electricity bill. Now that’s triple it. He takes a look at his current electricity rates. ‘I see that tomorrow’s energy prices are a lot higher than today’s. The gas price has also exploded,” he says wearily. ‘I haven’t had a salary since September. You want to be able to pay your staff. You also keep the fixed costs, such as a mortgage,’ he says. Because his wife has a job, Ophorst still manages to pay his bills. “But we see it getting harder every month.”
The trade association Association of Professional Fryers (ProFri) raised the alarm on Thursday. The energy bill for their members is now ‘really unaffordable’. ‘It mostly concerns small matters’, says director Frans van Rooij. ‘They work with installations that have a gas burner underneath. You can’t just lower it, because then you can’t fry fries anymore.’ Many entrepreneurs work with a flexible contract. When that ends, much higher prices await.
Not only entrepreneurs, but also their customers are faced with higher energy bills. Van Rooij says that they are less likely to get fries because they have less to spend. ‘Entrepreneurs should increase their prices by at least 20 percent. Prices in supermarkets have also increased. Consumers are affected from all sides’, says Van Rooij.
False teeth
Ophorst has been a household name in Sprang-Capelle for twenty years. ‘I open the door here myself every afternoon and every evening I close it myself.’ During that time he got to know his customers well. ‘I’ve seen an entire generation grow up here at my counter. That’s what you get with a neighborhood cafeteria. If you say that you have gone from 1,200 euros to 3,600 euros, you just can’t see the dentures falling out of their mouths.’
ProFri estimates that about 70 percent of the chip shops will be hit hard now or in the short term. ‘Our expectation is that it will also be fatal for some. Corona is still hanging around the neck of many people like a millstone, this is added.’ A number of chip shops can claim the government support package until April 1. The sector association calls on the Ministry of Economic Affairs to come up with new support measures. ‘Look at the energy tax’, says cafeteria owner Ophorst. ‘You pay more in tax than in consumption. If they don’t intervene in The Hague, we’ll have a lot more unemployed in six months.’
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