Qatar can be a nice place to live in that, if you take the time to look around, you can find really good prices for things. I mean really cheap. I’m talking I go back to Canada and find myself thinking “$15 for a T-shirt? Not a chance I’m paying that!”. Yet in Qatar there is also a large middle-upper class society so you can find price discrepancies for things that are mind-blowing.
Whenever I go to a restaurant I immediately look at the menu for the price of a soda. This to me is one of the best indicators of how expensive the restaurant is. Here’s a comparison of prices for Pepsi (all prices in $US)
Buy a can at a corner store: $0.40 (wow, cheaper than North America)
Restaurant at my compound: $0.81 (not bad)
Standard restaurant: $1.62 (comparable to Canada I guess)
Trendy café: $2.43 (um, getting pricey here)
Hotel: $4+ (What the heck?!)
Worst I’ve seen [this was in March, 2012]: $7.25! (forgetaboutit!!)
In some cases the markup is 15x-20x what it cost in the store! Imagine walking into a restaurant in North America, asking for a Coke, and getting a bill for $12! That’s pretty serious markup. What’s worse is that I know that the staff at the hotels get paid less than what they would in North America so that extra markup is just going right into the hotel’s profits. Gangsters. Prices for coffee is little better, most places charge for a cup of Nescafe the same price as an entire jar of the stuff.
It can work the same way for a lot of other items. I’ve bought dress shirts for work, during a sale, for about $5 each, but you can go to the mall (malls here are generally upscale) and see those Euro/US-brand shirts for $50-100. I can get nice ties for $3-4, yet at another store they sell ties for $25-35. I’ve had huge multi-item lunches of Indian or Sri Lankan food for $2-3, yet a nearby sushi place is selling one order of California rolls for $10. I just don’t get it sometimes.
One thing that is not cheap is DVDs, in most stores a new release is $40 – yet you pay on average $55 for a DVD player. There is a black market for pirated stuff of course but in the stores you pay serious money for DVDs. I have no idea why. CDs are about average, around $16. Books used to be a problem but now a Virgin Megastore has opened up and its prices are close to cover price. Having no sales tax helps a bit as well I think. When I went back to Canada on vacation all I really wanted to buy was books, DVDs, and CDs, everything else in Canada was generally more expensive.
One downside of the prices being so good here is that when you go on vacation everything suddenly becomes really expensive. I don’t even want to talk about the near-conniptions I went into when I stayed in London for a few days on my way back from Canada. Ack!
So if anyone is thinking of stopping by your experience can be as cheap or classy as you wish, just let me know.
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