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What Costs How Much, Where? Presenting The "Apple Index"
Forget Big Macs, the only ubiquitous commodity that counts now in the global purchasing-power-parity pyramid of currency-wars is the iPhone. Deutsche Bank has created a comprehensive set of tables on what costs how much and where around the world so whether it is soft-drinks in Brazil or Germany (over 690% of New York prices), Beer in Japan (192% of US prices), or exercise in Russia (sports shoes are 221% of US prices), it is perhaps evident that the impact of these overseas revenues in nominal USD may indeed be helping juice US corporates as they bow to Bernanke's debasement wisdom. But how much longer will Russians (or the Chinese for that sake) continue to pay around 50% more for their iGadgets than us lowly Americans.
Cost of Living (compared to New York) - Sacre Bleu
But while The Big Mac Index may be used by some, the iPhone is more ubiquitous and so we present "The Apple Index". It appears the South-Africa-to-Russia arb is screaming to be played...
The price of a Pepsi is 765% of New York prices in Brazil (and Chicago is 20% higher than New York?)...
But forget soft drinks, beer is where its at - unless you live in Japan where it costs 192% of US prices for a pint and therefore we highly recommend a trip to India or South Africa for your libations...
And after all those soft drinks and beer, exercise is necessary but not in Russia where a pair of Running Shoes costs 221% of US prices...
Indeed it is a diverse world but for all the necessities of life (iPhone, beer, soda, and running shoes) it pays to shop around - though of course energy prices to get to these nations will reduce some of that benefit very rapidly...
As prices for the real essentials (food and energy) are rising rapidly around the world...
Source: Deutsche Bank
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iJustdon'tcareanymore
iPhonyeconomy
Those Pepsi stats are faulty btw (atleast for Frankfurt).
I concur. I was in Berlin in December and a Pepsi/Coke/Sprite/whatever cancer in a can ran ~$6.50. There is no way it was $14 in Frankfurt. Maybe in the Airport but not regular retail price.
A can of Pepsi in Germany is roughly 1€. The stats were about 2 litre bottle in Pizza Hut.
>>"A can of Pepsi in Germany is roughly 1€."<<
Perhaps in Aldi or Edeka but at any restaurant in Berlin a can of soda was 3.00-4.50 euros and no refills on tap...
Sports shoes in Singapore are much cheaper than shown. Some of them are made there and Australians fly to Singapore to buy stuff.
whoever gathered the info must have just window shopped. There are back streets in singapore that you can just blow away Walmart prices
Here they use High Fructose Corn Syrup. Everywhere else they use plain old Sugar.
HEY! Please use the new, improved, and corporately-approved term - "corn sugar".
Don't want to have to bring you up on libel.
Mexican Cokes... Cane Sugar
And cigarettes
On a more local basis Mrs. Cog and I have noticed tremendous price variations between stores separated by as little as 5 or 10 miles. And often we are talking about the same store, but different location.
It seems that each store is adopting pricing based upon what the extremely local market will bear. Now more than ever it pays to comparison shop.....even for mundane household items.
a cog at the wheel beats one in, everytime
If discretionary travel is outside of the personal budget ...
Now I see why the Foxcon folks want to work 50 hours of OT each month. 210 hours per month X $1.50 hr = 1/3 of an iPhone!
cleveland?
Represents the future of the US
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1xDdoXDDGM
Does a 2L bottle of soda really cost $20 in Brazil & Frankfurt or am I misreading that, and if yes then what in the fuck are the ingredients?
Carbonated gold?
Also as a point of reference, a pair of Nikes cost around $140 in Cyprus, which is in Europe, so they better fucking give me that "barefoot" feeling when I sprint.
Alas, their Vietnam-made $2 shoes that generate 120% profit wouln't exist without marketing whore like myself.
Get Kramer and Newman on the phone..... we're driving to Rio with a load of 2Ls. Giddyup!
gotta wait for mother's day. the mother of all mail days...
These distortions of prices are probably being intensified by supply and demand. If no one is buying sugar water in a given country, it becomes a luxury item. The cost is then driven up further by the high expense of stocking a limited item.
iFlation
iFlaunt
iFoul
iFool
iFraud
iWant
where's germany in the last table?
But don't fill in your feet's natural arches with foam that has been shipped around the world. Disintermediate. Let your arches do what they have been designed to do.
https://www.lunasandals.com/about
http://www.chrismcdougall.com/
Disclosure statement: Short NKE, no more injuries, 30-70 miles / week
Useless Spamm.
Long NKE? Then maybe these Nike's are for you...
...and at $135 still delivers shareholder value.
Or maybe this link for Pepsi coupons is more useful for you?
Getting people to spend $135 to run barefoot is as awesome as getting people to spend $8 a gallon for bottles of tap water. I need to get my mylar packets of dehydrated water (only $6.99 ea.; 1 packet per liter) in front of the buyers at REI as fast as I can.
Friends working for coke revealed to me that there are several chemicals that go in the so called vitamin water to make it look clear, that are more harmfull than plain tap water. I can not convince my daughter though. She does not like the tap water taste I thought water did not have taste unless it was delivered by PVC pipe.
Buying a reverse osmosis system for your home is a good solution for you and your daughter.
Drinking bottled tap water like Evian is naivE.
No, actually not advertising your crap on a financial blog is more for me.
No, actually not advertising your crap on a financial blog is more for me. The topic of discussion is comparing apple products' prices through different countries. How do your stupid sandals add to the discussion?
BTW. I can get the same stupid sandals in any market in Latin America. Last I check for about 5 bucks a pair. They have been making them for decades.
Feet were also designed to work on soft earth sand and grass, not asphalt and cement. The padding also helps the knees, which is also not adapted to running in the urban environment.
Of course, if people had any damn sense, they'd know better than to run on concrete. Yet I see them go past my window every half-hour or so. Never mind the multi-million dollar track right next to their dorms.
No, they've got to be seen! I love watching them idle at the stoplights while staring at their watch, waiting for an even number to come up so they can take off again once they get a light. Math is hard.
In a park near one of my places there was a nice beaten path through grasses and trees that was used by me and maybe a hundred others who knew how to run it even at night jumping roots and eventually frogs... Then comes new management and to improve and make it saver to everybody they lay a thick and hard layer of concrete over that track.
Never mind, we are running a new one... may take over a year to make it nice though.
Ummmm since when were the costs of food and energy, included in inflation guesstimates.
Inflation is well contained don't you know.....duh.
I you are experiencing inflation than that demonstrates that you are not part of the real economy. The real economy has never looked better; sucks to be you.
They make their own reality...
The article is about Cost of Living (things people actually buy) rather than about inflation ( a made up bunch of weighted goods excluding food, energy, etc). Personally, I think this is a more accurate and useful way to measure things, you just need a larger range of prices to compare.
Outside of inflation, you can see interesting stuff where prices vary between cities in the same country with the same currency. It would be nice to see more places, goods and intervals.
The same friend of mine who said that "You'll wish the Mayans were right" also said a few years back that Benny will "export inflation" as his main tool to boost corporate earnings at home but he can only do this so long as the USD is the reserve currency of the world which on his time frame ends in 2012... we shall see!
so long as we're the reserve or so long as they don't inflate in retaliation. No matter what, a losing game...played by losers.
For kicks, Tyler should publish these indexes priced in GOLD and SILVER...
If you want a pint of domestic beer in Canada for $5.50 your going to have to go to a shit hole or find a cheapie night to get it. $6.50 for domestic and $7.50 for imported is the average for most pubs.
sheep buy iCrap I don't know why. Samsung and other crap is better.
Can tell how the world is going when a company selling electronic toys becomes the market.
Well there is no market anywhere. Just TPTB playing with their dicks. Best to ignore it all...keep my gold silver rice and cash handy.
I have a Mac pro that i use on my Sammy 55" LED. Apple kicks ass. So does Samusung. Both companies make outstanding products. What do you call that. iCrap or iSung?
Ahh, they are buying everything today, computers, phones, burritos, cars, clothes and TVs. America. Cannot go wrong. Just buy em. Forget debt and real growth. Gold, psfttt.
Beyond words.
Paper Pepsi, or physical?
A EBAY SELLERS GUIDE!!
If the average gross family income in the US is $49K and declining, it has to be much lower across the rest of the world so how exactly outside of the black market are Russians paying 220% for shoes that I can't afford here?
Drug trade, compensated friendship, other crimes pay.
The pride to be the only one in prison with Nike sneakers and an Ipad.
“It is the one sphere of life and activity where victory, security and success is always to the minority and never to the majority. When you find any one agreeing with you, change your mind. When I can persuade the Board of my Insurance Company to buy a share, that, I am learning from experience, is the right moment for selling it.” Keynes in 1937
Nowadays I could persuade my dentist, my lawyer and the photographer next door to buy Apple.
Well, for sure the photographer, he lost a fortune when he bought Deutsche Telekom in 2000s on margin. Because this time, it's different, really.
How ironic, the iphone is made in china and they have to pay 144% of the U.S. price
I 'member when a jug o' draft in St. Louis was $1.25 and ya got chips fer free. That was the year Tricky Dick closed the gold window.
Go figger.
I hear Tricky Dick works as a greeter these days ... 'Welcome to Hell, loser. Please kneel while I attach your leash.'
Is that imported beer in Japan or the local gear that gives you a hideous headache (radiation poisoning)?
I find that I am starting to not understand ZH anymore. The articles are becoming reactionary and petty. A lot of talk about technical charts and iStuff dominates when these topics used to be in the banner, under contributors.
Maybe it's just been a slow news month.
I hope that's the case.
With a centrally run world economy there's not much to talk about and when even their lies and statistics are being reheated... what to do? Basically we are all fed up with this crap and want a temporary escape. At last any childish thing will do, like the greek "extend and pretend" from yesterday, which was fun btw.
Outside that a focus on the small and privately run enterprises would be great. Preparing for the Great Collapse takes time and effort but even that comes to an end and then we have to do something until it finally comes...
Ahhh, the PPP indexes are the most idiotic thing to look at. I'm still waiting on the PPP Trojan/Lifestyles index though.
Forget the accessories; what's the PPPP (Purchasing Power Parity of Poontang)?
Those Secret Service guys in Colombia were just price checkers for the BLS.
Some people get all the plum jobs ... :-(
These charts were fun to peruse. Thanks, Tyler.
Maybe it is because I'm old (probably), or maybe it is because I spend ~10 hours a day watching computer monitors (and I've only got 2), but I do not for the life of me understand why the hell anybody wants a phone they can get email on - kids, maybe, but adults? Course, i don't get tweeting, either...
If this were a horse race , Dubai looks like the best valued horse.....
In Quebec, 1KG of the cheapest bread when it's in special will cost you about 3$. The average bread loaf with no special?? 4-5$..
What is really most important is a set of awesome looking hookers for the evening. It's hard to beat the prices in Colombia.
The prices for London seem way off unless you buy expensive brands and those brands wouldn't have had such cheap prices 5 and 10 years ago either!
1kg of rice is about $2.50, 1kg of Bread is around $1.80
I always stay in the same Boutique hotel in the French Concession area of Shanghai. Lots of expats from around the world live there and area has all of the trendy stores. In the department store across the street, mediocre brands like Izod and Polo sell for close to 2x the US Price. Adjacent Starbucks is a bit more expensive than US. Never see many people actually making purchases and don't know how they stay in business. The only store that seems to be consitently jammed with Chinese customers is the Apple device store with laptop prices running about 1.6x US prices.
Most (or much) of the differential on Apple prices is tax - electronic goods generally get heavily taxed in China.
The luxury goods stores see a lot of male couples shopping - not gays, but officials & their friends. (ie bribee & briber). I read this first somewhere, and once asked someone who managed a Chinese Ermen** (sp?) Zegna store. She confirmed it...
Russians are barefoot home-brewers, oversupplying the markit with cheap plonk? Boris!!
The inflation is tame.
Signed Bernanke.
just as i expected. we're just exporting inflation to other countries who de facto need to tie their monetary policy to the Fed since oil is priced in dollars. de-link oil from the dollar, the world sees peace.
Beer is way off for China. Average bar price, more like $1.50.
Rice is off too. 1kg is around $1.29 per kg for high grade stuff.
Gas prices are also off by a bit as well.
Looks pretty weird that Zurich now even passes London for most expensive city - until you think about where the GBP and the CHF have moved compared to 5 years ago... Or in other words the comparison is worthless unless you plan on doing a vacation in those cities.