Attars are suburban Aladdin’s caves. Their shelves groan under every kind of canned and dried food and rainbow bottles of cleaning products. Their tills are circled with vats of olives in brine, fresh homemade harissa and piles of sticky pastries and chocolate. They sell cans of tuna bigger than one's head and single triangles of cheese or one cigarette to the desperate.

Such traditional retailers make up around 56% of Tunisia’s retail sector, according to market research company Euromonitor’s report from 2020. They’ve weathered competition from big supermarket chains to remain cornerstones of their communities.

However, behind the smiles and cheery greetings at the local shops lies the stressful reality of bullying suppliers, rising prices and narrowing profit margins. A local shopkeeper in Tunis told Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity, “The prices keep going up. We had three price increases in 15 days, but even as the prices go up our profit margins decrease.”

Tunisia has long suffered from supply fluctuations due to a supply chain complicated by dwindling currency reserves and a highly convoluted rent-based economy. It has been further aggravated by disruptions in the global supply chain by a variety of factors such as the pandemic, the shipping crisis and most recently the Ukraine-Russia war, but life goes on and people need to go shopping.