Human Stories Documenting Iranians' Inability to Face Inflation

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Iranian society has entered a critical phase in managing its daily expenses, seven months after the outbreak of the Iranian war with the United States, as the maritime blockade and the halt of oil exports have cast heavy shadows on living standards. The manifestations of the crisis are evident in the difficult details that families are experiencing, ranging from the inability to purchase essential medications and pay rent, to the widespread loss of jobs in the private sector and a sharp decline in income levels.

Reports from citizens in the capital Tehran and other cities reveal a paralysis that has extended to the most intricate details of life, infiltrating healthcare, children's expenses, and the income of small business owners, according to what Reuters reported.

The harshness of the living scene is evident in the stories of citizens like Hadiya, a housewife in her sixties living in northern Tehran on her husband's meager pension, struggling to provide for her mother who suffers from Alzheimer's, such as diapers and medications. When she went to the market to buy a school bag for her grandson, she was shocked by a record price increase that equaled five times her expectations, so she settled for just a notebook and pens.

In a related context, teacher A.J. is unable to regularly buy his mother's medications after he was forced to move with his family to a northern village due to schools shifting to online education, amidst real fears of not being able to afford the costs of returning to Tehran if in-person classes resume.

The high costs of psychological treatment pushed Nazanin, a 34-year-old woman in the city of Sanandaj in Kurdistan, to finally quit smoking after years of being unable to do so.

Those wishing to overcome bureaucratic obstacles find that the black market has become a main outlet despite its high cost, as one citizen had to pay 200 dollars in hard currency to a surgeon to bypass complicated official procedures for undergoing surgery. On another note, citizens talk about the increasing phenomena of bribery requests at security checkpoints, where one of them paid double amounts to police officers when stopped without identification papers. Under these pressures, employee M. H. was forced to return money her previous workplace had paid to social security after her year-long contract was unexpectedly canceled this month, leaving her family to only spend on food and internet service for watching movies and communication.

Engineers and traders are observing deep transformations in the social structure, as Bijan, a 40-year-old man, and his wife were forced to exhaust their savings and leave their apartment in Tehran, moving their lives to a semi-random area outside the capital and working in private tutoring while waiting to move to a farther and cheaper city. Architect A. A. expressed the decline in the welfare levels of higher-income classes, noting that he drove his car on a damaged spare tire for two weeks due to his inability to buy a new tire immediately, warning of an expected energy crisis that could disrupt supply chains.

Behnam Riyadi, the owner of a restaurant, and Ramin Youssefnia, the owner of a grocery store in Tehran, confirm that customers are limiting their purchases to the bare minimum, such as two items instead of ten, while traders are selling with almost no profit margins to avoid closure and unemployment.

This field incident aligns with the Iranian Central Bank recording an annual inflation rate of 84.4% in August, along with a surge in consumer goods inflation reaching 92.2%, and the price of the dollar in the free market reaching 2.4 million rials, coinciding with the International Monetary Fund's expectations of a 6.1% contraction in the economy, despite government decisions to raise the minimum wage by 60% and distribute food vouchers to cope with the repercussions of the blockade.

The roots of the current escalation can be traced back to the activation by European countries of the re-imposition of UN sanctions on Tehran, which led to a collapse in economic stability and sparked widespread protests in several cities last January. The crisis worsened unprecedentedly with the United States and Israel launching a large-scale military operation against Iran seven months ago, accompanied by a strict maritime blockade on Iranian ports, cutting off the main export artery represented by oil shipments. In response, Tehran imposed strict restrictions on the movement of tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, causing turmoil in global energy markets and rising international oil and gas prices, pushing both sides towards a new round of diplomatic maneuvers under the pressure of economic losses.