Retail Prices, the prices at which consumer goods are sold to the population. They redeem all production and sales costs. In the USSR, the retail price includes the wholesale price of industry (see Wholesale Prices) which includes cost of product, profit, wholesale realisation premium, and for some products the turnover tax and trade discount ( premium) which is used to cover circulation costs and the profit of retail trade organisations. Trade discounts are differentiated for goods, locations, and retail systems. Retail prices are divided into state, commission trade and collective-farm market prices. State retail prices are fixed in a planned way. It is at these prices that most goods in the state and cooperative trade are sold (over 98 per cent of retail trade turnover). Most products with approximately equal production costs in different regions of the country have uniform retail prices throughout the country. Zonal prices have been established for the most important food items, primarily because of the differences in transportation costs. Some products are priced in the Union Republics or locally. Depending on the time they remain in force, prices are classified into permanent, temporary, and seasonal (frrit and vegetables). In the collective-farm market, prices are dictated by supply and demand rather than planned by the staie. On the other hand, the state indirectly regulates them through pricing in the state retail system. Retail prices have a specific role to play in the system of planned pricing. They express the relations between socialist society and its individual members in the processes of distributing the national income and of exchange. The level of real wages with given cash income and taxes, depends on the level of retail prices. The lowering of retail prices is economically rooted in the reduction of production cost and availability of state commodity reserves. The socialist state consistently raises living standards by increasing cash income and the social consumption funds at the same time as maintaining stable state retail prices for basic food and non-food items, and reducing prices when conditions ripen and reserves are accumulated.