Costs

The pound is really strong right now. Almost worth two US dollars. I'd have thought it was the highest currency in the world, but someone informed me it's only about the sixth; the higher ones are all oil-exporting countries, though.

This past Christmas lots of English went to America, especially New York, on holiday, and often shopping was a big reason. It's hard for me to imagine how New York could be a cheap holiday playground. The US and the Continent are great destinations for British shopping, especially for small, expensive things like electronics.

But as a result Brits have one of the highest costs of living in the world too. We do pretty well in Ipswich but London is crazy. A former janitor's closet in Chelsea, 11' x 7', sold for about £170k recently, and it doesn't even have windows. Even with our two incomes, I doubt we could live comfortably in London, certainly not in the City. Most people my age couldn't expect to buy a flat by themselves; it's much more common to buy with others.

You'd think with the dollar at about half the value of the pound, that prices here should be roughly half what they are in the States, but that's not the case. In some cases, they're even equal. For real estate and autos, the price differences are pretty linear, but for lower-cost items there's a lot of inconsistency. Here are some comparison prices based on things in my universe (note: prices are not guaranteed to be perfectly accurate or current because I am too lazy to look them up).

Item	$US	£UK
Song downloaded from iTunes	.99	.79
New compact disc	15	12
Men's dress shirt	25	45
Winter gas bill	100	60
Casual family dinner	40	30
Sandwich, crisps, canned drink for takeout	7	5
Burger, chips, pint at lunchtime	15	10
Sonicare toothbrush	100	100

You might also think there would be certain types of items that are disproportionately cheaper in the UK, but I can't think of any.

Last week I read an article about the UK pricing of the Playstation 3. A Sony representative was asked why it was so much higher in the UK than the US. He replied that a big part of it was the VAT (value-added tax), but the reporter countered that even with US sales tax factored in, the UK price was still disproportionately higher. The Sony guy confessed that they have to pay their UK workers more because of the higher cost of living, and that also factored into the higher prices.

Now that we're earning pounds, we don't compare prices as much, but when we were still spending dollars, it was depressing to think about how much more we were actually paying for things.