Cheap expats

[whammy]

WHAT! BA is CRAAAAAZZZZYYYY CHEAP!

 

[Celia]

Appliances aint cheap....and they break down quick. My fridge and washing machine broke down after 2 & 3 years. Thank god I could get fridge fixed (for 500 pesos) as a new one is double UK cost.
In UK, large fridges start at 1000 pesos, here it's about 2500.
In UK, you can get a dish washer for about 1500, I bought one of the cheapest I could find for 2400! Ditto washing machines.
And it all breaks down as soon as the guarantee expires.

 

[Uncle Dermot]

Well, clothes quality here is low. This is a fact. There are some other things that are better, like food.
Regards

True, quality and price of clothes in Europe is way better. Simply look at "cheap" chains like Benetton, Pull & Bear, H&M, Springfield and the lot. Zara is a kind of expensive boutique here, whereas in Europe it sells affordable and good quality products. One of my friends, who is a top manager in a big company in Buenos Aires, is always complaining about how bad the quality of stuff here is, he is travelling to Europe or the US quite often for business and buy all his clothes there. Please keep in mind that most of the "cheap" clothes you buy in Europe are sewn in Morocco, Bangladesh, Turkey, so I don't even think it is a matter of European workers being good at sewing!
On the other hand it is also true that food products are cheap, some of them are ridiculously affordable (rice, fruit and vegetable)!

 

[Celia]

If you go to Iceland frozen foods store in UK, they have a section where everything is 1 pouund i.e 6 pesos. That's 6 pesos for a giant pizza, 6 pesos for any frozen meal or multi-pack of small pizzas, french fries etc, 6 pesos for a giant family tub of ice-cream.
Here it's 20 pesos for a frozen pizza, 18 pesos for a one-person sized tart, 6 pesos for a tiny tub of child sized ice-cream, 10 pesos for about 10 patitas, 12 pesos for frozen burgers.
Maybe in 2 years time we will be paying 60 pesos for a pizza....

 

[Uncle Dermot]

If you go to Iceland frozen foods store in UK...

I wanted to cry when they closed down the Iceland shops in Ireland: they were so great and cheap
If you buy stone-baked pizza bases in a bakery shop they are 5 pesos for 2 of them, you just need to add a bit of tomato sauce and something for the topping and you can have your pizza at home...at the same time it might be cheaper to go to a restaurant and get a giant pizza and 2 chopps for 40 pesos...
This city is crazy!

 

[elhombresinnombre]

If you go to Iceland frozen foods store in UK, they have a section where everything is 1 pouund i.e 6 pesos. That's 6 pesos for a giant pizza, 6 pesos for any frozen meal or multi-pack of small pizzas, french fries etc, 6 pesos for a giant family tub of ice-cream.
Here it's 20 pesos for a frozen pizza, 18 pesos for a one-person sized tart, 6 pesos for a tiny tub of child sized ice-cream, 10 pesos for about 10 patitas, 12 pesos for frozen burgers.
Maybe in 2 years time we will be paying 60 pesos for a pizza....

I don't think that it is either useful nor fair to make price for price comparisons without making cultural comparisons too. While I've noticed more and more convenience products appearing in the supermarkets. it's my impression that the overwhelming majority of Argentine people cook from scratch as I do. Convenience foods cost so much because they are relatively speaking uncommon yet there's fresh fruit and vegetables in abundance when they are in season - at prices Londoners would gasp at. Then again, England looks on - for example - meringue products as special occasion, luxury goods and meringue nests cost a fortune. In Buenos Aires one buys everyday meringue by the 100g. Prices are undoubtably going up but anyone trying to live their London life in the heart of Buenos Aires will find their cost of living even less affordable. Supermarkets in Britain aren't cheap - they only say that they are - and specialist shops are expensive and disappearing fast. In Buenos Aires supermarkets are convenient but openly expensive and the better quality produce is available more cheaply in the specialist shops and on street stalls.

 

[dutara]

...
pants pockets always end up with holes in them after a few months. I don´t carry much else besides a wallet but at some point I always find a coin falling into my shoe and then I think here we go again another hole in the pants pockets. And it´s not the stitching the comes out, its the actual fabric that is used just disintegrates or wears out very quickly.
...

Happened to me enough times in Brazil as well. Not only that, the pockets are very shallow, so that just about anything is guaranteed to fall out when you sit down. I call them "share the wealth" pockets.
I've also bought trousers in SE Asia that were of ok quality but the pocket fabric literally decomposed after a few weeks.

 

[Choripán]

First of all, what's wrong with being cheap? You like throwing your money away, apparently. I'm sure many of the locals love you for it. This town is chock full of crap-ass restaurants and tacky fashion outlets that stay in business exclusively because of the ever-increasing flow of gringos willing to waste money on purchases of very low quality. You would do Buenos Aires a huge favor if you were a little more discriminate about where and how you dropped your cash.

Second, shit is getting expensive because of the ridiculous cycle of inflation fueled by a government printing money to decrease the value of its public debt. No, I'm not talking about America. Prices are going up and up an up in Argentina, but so are wages. Unless of course you're a gringo living off wealth in foreign banks rather than income from domestic employers. In that case, you're totally fucked by an exchange rate that's not allowed to float freely against the dollar. The Argies are playing little games with their printing machines and those of us from the outside just looking for a little strange are eating shit because of it.

Third, Argentina is a third-world country with a first-world ego. They love high prices for the same reason they love designer clothes: because it makes them feel like global players. The sad fact is that if they could only keep inflation in their pants they would be much better off in the long run. No one wants to buy anything besides cows from Argentina, and the world is only buying the cows because they're cheaper than the herds up in North America. When these prices reach parity with gringoria, Argentina can kiss its economy good-bye!

So not only am I proud that I'm cheap, I would strongly encourage all others to adopt the same lifestyle. Do it for yourself, but more importantly do it for Argentina! Long live Titus Waddus, Emperor of the Cheap!

 

[Celia]

Even cooking from scratch, it's getting expensive. Cheese is double the price here (50 pesos a kilo) and ham is also going that way (60-70 a kilo). A chicken is now over 35 pesos for God's sake! I can get one pre-roasted in a choice of 4 different flavours from the Waitrose on King's Road, Chelsea for that!!!!

 

[seventeen]

To be honest I don't see expats complaining that much, at least I haven't noticed we complain more than the locals, it's just part of daily life, you shell out your pesos and more often than not a disappointed expression comes out as we work hard for our money.. Overall those who are here are reasonably happy about how things are, otherwise we wouldn't stay here, would we?