@infiniteloop I am not going to describe you as naive but rather I will share with you my story regarding the shops that sell recharge cards.infiniteloop wrotePlease boycott the exchange places, these criminals want to be billionaires in a couple of weeks while putting huge commissions on the rates, if we all boycott them including buying internet and cell phones line recharges we can make them return to normal.
I am upset that there are still no law to fix a max commission rate for them since the Lebanese war
My brother has a small cell shop and dealing with recharge cards is his daily business and here is what you need to know:
Service Centers (for Touch & Alfa) will sell you (dealer or regular customer) the recharge card with the exchange of 1507.5LL. Sound great? But guess what? They will only sell you a max of 3 cards because they want you to deal with their resellers. Their resellers (official or black market ones) will sell you at the exchange of 1600LL (3 weeks ago), 1650LL (2 weeks ago), 1800LL(last week) and now they will only accept USD.
In the case of my brother he has only a few USD in his cash drawer that will have to use to buy recharge cards to end up selling them to customers in LL for 3.5% profit if (and only if) the exchange is 1500LL. In this case, it will be very stupid of him not to sell his USD notes for a currency exchange shop for 1700LL (don't you think) and now he has 2 choices:
Sell the 1-month recharge cards for 49,000LL and risk being shout at and reported to the ministry.
Not sell recharge cards.
Now he is not selling recharge cards because he has no access to USD and adding to this problem the bad economy and low purchasing power of customers, he will shutdown his business soon.
Stop being angry at the "small" people.