Family shops, stores, and restaurants around the town are selling up to 50 per cent more food than usual as the mercury climbs and temperatures remain above freezing.
In the summer, people are often buying more than they can eat at once and sometimes even more than their fridge can hold.
The town’s main food court, at the Royal Perth Hotel, sells out of items that normally go for $2-$3 a piece.
But the popular Royal Perth Food Centre sells more than half of the items it normally sells for $4-$5.
And the main ice cream shop, The Ice Cream Parlour, sells more of its regular seasonal flavours than it normally does, with the average price being $1.30 per pound.
“It’s quite good for people who are trying to save for the summer but we also don’t have enough food in the fridge to cover the meals that people need to eat,” a shop employee at The Ice Crepe and Ice Cream Bar said.
“So we have to run a big shop.
It’s like a freezer.”
At the other end of the food chain, the city’s other popular ice cream and candy shop, the Chocolate Covered Ice Cream and Candy Shop, is selling up only a few hundred items a day, despite being in the middle of the city and in the heart of the ice cream business.
“We’ve been trying to get back to a normal level of volume and we’re doing really well,” owner, Tony Williams, said.
Mr Williams said his ice cream store has been “getting away with it” in the city for the past couple of weeks and is “still going strong”.
“We’re still able to keep the icecream up to the normal levels,” he said.
He said the shop had to “be a bit more careful” with its prices, because they were not necessarily the cheapest in town.
“The ice cream prices have been going up but we’re not getting anywhere near the ice-cream prices that other stores have,” he added.
The average price of a $3.90-a-barrel barrel of condiments at the Chocolate and Ice Covered shop is $2.95 per barrel.
But while that’s lower than the $4.99-a
