Price is (not) Right

On Wednesday, Erika and I went up to HyperCITY - which is the fancy grocery store. Fancy may not be the right word... It looks the most like a US grocery store and by comparison to the other places I buy food, it is fancy. It's kind of like a Target Greatland because it also sells household goods, kids toys, sports equipment, electronic equipment and appliances. I really have no far how many kilometers it is from our apartment, but not in traffic, it takes 45-60 minutes to get there. It has taken more than 90 minutes sometimes. But it is worth it for a few items.

For instance, it is the only place in Mumbai I've found (or even heard about) that sells whole bean coffee. You can get ground coffee from Cafe Coffee Day (Mumbai's version of Starbucks). But it seems that most people drink instant coffee. Let me rephrase. Most people drink chai. Those who drink coffee, tend to drink instant. Diego's Colombian roots do not allow him to drink instant coffee (unless we are camping). So coffee was high on my list for things at HyperCITY. I also got cream of celery soup (for making a casserole I like a lot), mosquito repellent (these funny things that you plug in at night - Diego swears that anyone from Latin America knows what they are), a vacuum cleaner, taco seasoning, and a few other things.

While I am good at math, I am still slow on learning the metric equivalent of things. So when coffee is priced as rupees/gram, I can't instantly in my head convert that to USD/lb. Of course, with pen and paper - no problem. But in the market, I tend not to bother. For the things I really want, I almost don't care how much they cost. Almost. Let's just say that the coffee turned out to be AMAZINGLY expensive.

Wanting to have some fun this morning, I took pictures of five things for people to guess the price. See how you do.

Cheerios:

Coffee (1lb)

Eggs (one dozen)

Yogurt (250mL)

Slim Milk (1L)

Answers:
Cheerios: $6.00
Coffee (1lb): $40.00
Eggs (one dozen): $0.75 (yes, I realize there are 15 eggs in the photo)
Yogurt (250mL): $1.50
Slim Milk (1L): $0.82 (1 Gal - $3.40)

I don't have a picture of limes, but I can get 6 limes for $0.25. But a mango (at the end of mango season) cost me $3.50. It's crazy.

The dollar is currently dropping against the rupee. I didn't actually take economics in college, so all I can really say is that the rupees we get on payday buy a lot more dollars each month. That's good. And it seems to make things more expensive. When I first arrived it was about INR 46 = USD 1. So that box of Cheerios used to cost more like $5.60.

But there isn't much that the dollar can do to make it OK to spend $40 PER POUND for coffee beans. For the same money I could either by 1.5lbs of coffee or a vacuum cleaner.

I will do another post about the inexpensiveness of things (like courier fees of less than 20-cents to send something across Mumbai - more than 1 hour by train). Because there are lots and lots and lots of inexpensive things as well!