There are some things that are cheaper in the US due to economies of scale or tax policy and such. And somethings that I generally presume would be cheaper overseas. But occasionally I am caught off guard by things that are more expensive than I expected overseas.
Mrs Iggy is Colombian and occasionally asks me to send odd things to the family. The latest is a virtual medicine cabinet of routine OTC meds (easy enough to add to a care package) and she has even asked for some prescription meds for family(which I cannot send),
Most surprising to me was the price of routine generic diabetes medications. Walmart sells both of my diabetes pills at $4 for a one month supply. That is 30 tablets of 4mg of glimepiride and 60 tablets of 1000mg of metformin. Cheap.
Two of the tias in Colombia are diabetic. Their metformin works out to $16.37 per month, more than 4 times the price I pay. And their glimepiride runs $34.51, more than 8 times what I pay.
And aspirin in Colombia… $8 buys me 1000 tablets in the States. A similar quantity of aspirin tablets in Colombia runs more than $136!
I thought the USA had the most overpriced drugs and these came as quite a surprise to me. So, Dopers and overseas prices that surprised you?
Owning a car in singapore is extremely expensive due to tariffs and regulations.
I’m sure guns are way more expensive in many non-US nations too.
I believe personal electronics cost more in china than the US due to tax policy and regulations. I recently read someone talking about how the Chinese exchange students would buy tons of electronics at places like best buy to take home to family.
I assume a lot of it is due to tax policy and regulations. But I"m surprised OTC drugs are more expensive in Colombia.
Back 40 years ago when we took the QE2 to Europe, the Chief Engineer told us that he bought European brand clothing, like Izod, in New York because it was way cheaper than in Europe.
When I moved from the US to the UK I was surprised how much cheaper car insurance was here. But thinking about it a bit, since we have the NHS the insurance doesn’t have to cover medical costs.
Most McDonalds menu items are only slightly more expensive in Canada, except for Chicken McNuggets which are eleventy zillion times more expensive. I even started a thread about this glaring disparity:
Since then, Burger King restaurants in Canada have introduced cheap(ish) chicken nuggets, so the theory people expressed about different food standards in Canada doesn’t seem to be the driving factor.
Soda. It always surprised my how expensive Coke was in Europe, and, especially, how cheap wine was. In Barcelona I got a nice glass of wine for a euro, try finding any that cheap here. A soda would have cost way more.
I’ve always been a little bit surprised when I google things like video games or electronic/computer components, and see that the prices in the UK are pretty much what they’d be in dollars in the US… but in pounds in the UK. So a Razer Kraken headset might be $79 in the US, and £79 in the UK, which is something like 30% more these days.
I’m always surprised about the high costs of phone and data plans in the US that I read about here. I’m not quite up-to-date on US fees, but for comparison, these are the conditions for my communication plans: I have 500 MBits/s unlimited data over cable combined with a landline with unlimited phone calls for € 39.99/month and a monthly mobile plan for € 7.99 for 3GB LTE/4G with unlimited phone calls/texts. I don’t think you can get anything that cheap in the US.
Everything in Norway is ridiculously expensive, but the one thing you think you could get a good deal on - gasoline (they produce 2 million barrels a day) - is 2 Euros a liter ($7 a gallon!)
I recently caught a video about the luck & excellent management of Norway’s financial affairs that discussed the high cost of living. The entire video is very well done but here’s a timestamped link to the part that compared costs for the US vs Norway: https://youtu.be/hKGwGAHznFQ?t=555
The most eye-opening is the cost of an identical 2018 Volkswagen Golf. $19,990 stateside vs $36,473 Norway. I’ve also heard that liquor in Scandinavia is generally very expensive.
back in the 80s before the us caught up with them a friends swedish penpal used to have people buy cigarettes and have them shipped for him because they were 11 bucks a pack… in 1988…
Hiring a car in Patagonia. Most things were cheaper in Argentina, but the car hire was over 700USD for 10 days, and we got an incredibly beaten up, basic model with manual windows and no central locking - may have been a Chevrolet Corsa. Whereas in Austria, a generally expensive country, we paid the equivalent of 240USD for a week and got a brand new BMW.
I also paid something like £5 for a small packet of ibuprofen in a pharmacy in Sicily, which you can buy for about 50p in a supermarket here in the UK.
When I was in Sicily in the late Nineties, I was really surprised by how expensive restaurant food was. We were traveling with an Italian from Genoa who made the same observation. Which was weird because he kept saying Sicily was to mainland Italians what Baja was to Californians - which to me, meant cheap.
I don’t remember the restaurants being any cheaper or more expensive than the rest of Italy. What was most noticeable to me was how run-down the town was. Get off the main streets and there were boarded up houses, rubbish lying around, buildings and roads crumbling… almost felt like a third world country at times. And the lack of young people was striking, too. Probably most were off working in much richer north Italy or Germany or whereever. It’s sad.
One more from me. Tourist brochures of sun drenched Caribbean islands frequently feature tropical cocktails. And in many islands the rum is cheap and plentiful. But rum’s not cheap (nor is any booze) in the Cayman Islands where I lived many years.
Sure, I expect high prices at the tourist bars at the hotels. No surprise there. But a basic liter of rum at the liquor store is US$40 or more. Most of that is tax.
I never put your username and location together until I saw your avatar. Your choice of name makes sense now.
They’re an introduced species here in SoFL, but we’re knee deep in them. They’re cute except they poop on everything, like to eat our flowers, & burrow in the lawn.
I have moved back Stateside since. But when I was in Cayman Iggy Pop was a neighbor. Really. And friends thought my screenname was in tribute to him. Nope.
In SE Asia, specifically Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, sunscreen is more expensive than here in Australia.
And whilst wine is prohibitively expensive, local vodka in all of those places is ridiculously cheap. Especially Vietnam…one can buy a bottle of ‘Hanoi Vodka’ for app 120k VND, which is about $6.00 AUD. Bloody crazy.
Nope.
I was going to go from memory, as I was a smoker at the time, but decided to check. The answer is in Swedish and pdf, so I won’t bother linking, but smokes were about $2.50 a pack in '88. Adjusted for inflation, in case that is what you mean, that’s about five bucks today.