“We are struggling.”
“I can’t feed my family.”
“It’s getting really tough to get by.”
At first glance, these testimonies might seem to reflect quotes of an economy in depression or communities enduring the upheaval of war. However, they are the mundane realities of working-class households in Bangladesh -- a country neither at war nor in severe distress. Yet, the world seems to be maliciously devised in ways that consistently leave them at the short end of the stick.
The economic realities of Bangladesh -- institutional shortcomings coupled with rising inflation -- have left nearly 28% of people in poverty, according to a 2025 PPRC survey. For the sake of simplicity, poverty is often reduced to the notion of having limited financial means. But what if poverty is not just about having less money? What if, in the very act of struggling to make ends meet, the poor are made to pay relatively more for the same necessities that the wealthy can afford for less?
Oscar Lewis’s culture of poverty theorizes that poverty is a self-perpetuating cycle through attitudes, behaviour and values that emerge under conditions of persistent deprivation. However, the cycle of entrapment occurs in more insidious ways, specifically through concepts like poverty premium. Consider a kilogram of sugar - in retail, it costs around ৳110/kg; but in bulk, it is only ৳90/kg -- a 19% decrease.
Sugar is hardly an isolated case. We have found larger disparities across several essential goods. Masoor dal, for instance, showed a price difference of 45% between retail and bulk purchasing, while onion showed a gap of 44%. Rice, perhaps the most important staple product in our households, was around 36% cheaper when purchased in bulk. Atta and maida have shown similar differences, at roughly 37% and 34% respectively. Each of these comparisons is like for like: The same product, of the same quality, priced on the same day. The only thing that changed was how much was bought.
a typical 4.26-person household, rice alone accounts for 42 kilograms of consumption monthly. Because of this sheer volume, even a modest price difference across several retail purchases can aggregate to a substantial monthly expense. In our household basket calculation, rice itself accounted for roughly Tk1,303 of the Tk1,815 in potential monthly savings, approximately 72% of the total.
Across the basket, the difference between retail and bulk purchasing amounted to Tk1,815 per month for a household eating at national average levels, or Tk21,780 per year. Among Bangladesh’s poorest households, whose monthly expenditure exceeds income by roughly Tk3,817, the potential savings would represent nearly half of that deficit. While the numbers are staggering, they barely capture the harshness of reality: If the poorest households live on about Tk283 a day, how can they afford any bulk products? If they can’t do so individually, could they access them collectively?
This is the idea behind Shomobay. Within neighbourhoods, families pre-register their weekly requirements. Afterwards, their demands are aggregated. We buy in bulk from the nearest wholesaler and hand everything over the same day at a collection point, at close to the bulk price -- curbing any storage constraints. The family does not have to become a bulk buyer. Instead, Shomobay becomes the intermediary between all the customers of bulk products in the neighbourhood, establishing a collective initiative.
The aim is not to reinvent how groceries are bought, but to recalibrate the purchasing position of the household; and that is what Shomobay achieved in the first pilot.
Anwar, one of the participants in the pilot, stated, “If I could buy through Shomobay every week, my monthly savings would increase significantly.” Fatema, a mother of three, echoed the same sense of optimism, “Because of this initiative, after buying the household groceries, I still have enough money left to buy other things.” If each of the 15 pilot families bought the full basket this way every month, they would collectively save about ৳27,225 a month. Across 1,000 families, that becomes about ৳18 lakh a month, or more than ৳2 crore a year. For a single family, the saving is about twice what a year of food inflation adds to a family’s grocery bill. Over a year, it adds up to roughly 45 days of wages for a garment worker on minimum wage. Broken down to a single day, the saving comes to about ৳60. In the poorest tenth of households, that is close to what one person lives on in a day.
Bangladesh is not short of attempts to make groceries cheaper. While TCB provides subsidizedlentils, oils and sugar, coverage has shrunk from 1 crore families to roughly 70 lakh after mass cancellations. Truck sales arrive irregularly, often with long queues. Buyers we spoke to also raised concerns of corruption, syndicates and poor quality. Additionally, newer state initiatives like the Family Card are barely accessible to the people who need it most.
Abroad, the idea of pooling demand has been tried at scale. India’s DealShare was once valued at $1.7 billion; by 2026, it was in sale talks worth around $90 million. Kenya’s Twiga Foods, which raised over $150 million, entered administration in August 2026. China’s community group buying startups ended in a price war. Each time, the model has broken down the same way: prices subsidized with investor money, expensive warehouses and delivery fleets, or credit that customers could not repay.
Shomobay is built to avoid all three. There is no subsidy, families pay the real bulk price. No warehouse, goods are bought and sold upfront. No credit, families pay upfront. Shomobay does not aim to replace TCB but rather to mitigate the shortcomings that it has been plagued with for years.
As we continue refining the model, Shomobay is building a wider presence beyond the neighbourhoods in which it operates. We envision Shomobay growing from neighbourhoods to cities, from cities to communities across Bangladesh, and eventually beyond Bangladesh, wherever households face the same fundamental disadvantage of paying more simply because they can afford to buy less.
Jaif Bin Morshed is a research intern, PRI (Policy Research Institute).