However, I don’t live in London. I live in a small town in Hampshire. And although London prices for housing and eating out are more expensive than in other parts of the UK, there’s not such a difference in other costs.
The price of food in supermarkets, for instance, is pretty much the same across the country - in fact in remote parts of the north it is often more expensive, due to the added transport costs.
My parents live in Devon. Their house was still expensive for what it is (a two-bedroom bungalow), they still pay a fortune for petrol (more than I do here, in fact - last time I visited it was 89.9p a litre), and their local supermarket charges the same as, or more than, mine. High prices are not restricted to London.
Yes, that is one good thing. The price you see on the label is the price you pay. One of the only common exceptions to this is computers, which for some reason almost always have the price excluding VAT in huge numbers, with a tiny figure showing the actual total price underneath, eg:
Dullard Dell Exhaleron 3.2GHz yadda yadda DVD-RW.
Only £899 (£1056.33 inc VAT)
I’m not sure why they do this. It could be because most computers are bought by businesses, which don’t pay the VAT. But it still seems like a con.
There’s plenty of other things that are cheaper in other regions: Having your car serviced; cinema tickets; bus fares; window cleaners; beer (oh yeah, we’ve done that one );…
Yeah, the price I quoted above included taxes. Each of the legs were something like £5, and with taxes, it was the price I quoted. There simply is no airline that is anywhere near as affordable as Easyjet in the US, with or without taxes added in.
Just to reiterate, with very few exceptions, you don’t notice the sales tax (“VAT”), since it’s built into the retail price. Thus the prices Colophon is comparing might actually be lower than the US equivalents, since they’re quoted ex-sales tax.
This is a whole other thread, but some people quite like it, it’s free to all, but you can still go private if you want to pay, and get hotel-style care et al.
I always think the question should be “why is the pound perennially overvalued against the dollar?”, rather than why Britain is more expensive than the US. I know it amounts to the same thing, but to me it seems a more realsitic way of looking at it.
Sorr, totally screwed up the meaning of the first paragraph of the previous post. Please ignore. It should read:
Just to reiterate, with very few exceptions, people in the UK don’t notice the sales tax (“VAT”), since it’s built into the retail price. Thus the with-tax UK prices Colophon is comparing might actually be lower than they seem, since the US equivalents are usually quoted ex-sales tax.
Try buying a car in Denmark, our gasoline prices equal the british ones and we have about 180% tax on the actual car.
Just one example:
A brand new Ford Focus Ambiente (the most basic Focus model we have) is 211000 DKK ($36979.27 or £19946.3)
I don’t think we have value meals here but a standard medium sized BigMac menu is about 50 DKK ($8.76 or £4.73)
I live 125km (77 miles) from Copenhagen where I work, while housing is cheap there train fare is 128 DKK ($22.43 or £12) each way - I buy a train card each month and with the rebate that gives, I’m down to 2410 DKK ($422 or £227) a month. I tried looking up appartment prices in Copenhagen and found a 56m2 one in the south of Copenhagen, priced at 1350000 DKK ($236597 or £127618) that one is actually not so bad.
Or sales tax is 25%.
For reference, I earn 354000 DKK ($62041 or £33464) a year with about 5 years experience (IT related work), out of those I pay about 60% income tax before any deductions.
If you want to see some really screwy pricing, I was looking at the price of Shortwave radios a few months back. The price for some models was more in £ than it was in $ , even before the exchange rate was calculated. Wibble wibble hatstand territory.
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