Aug 15 2009
Cost of Groceries in the Philippines - Lessons Learned
On Monday I’ll do another blog about the cost of the items I pictured last week (See blog here) but let me tell you about my lesson learned while grocery shopping yesterday. Grocery shopping has always been my thing to do alone. It is my chance to be out on my own, enjoy the time, plan our meals and just get away. That ended when I arrived here. First, before you can even think about shopping you have to think about parking. Many stores don’t have readily available parking and I have a tough time backing into a space. So I wind up waiting until someone can take me to the store and drop me off. Second, most stores won’t have everything I want so meal planning goes out the window and you wind up just buying something in hopes of figuring out what to make from it.
Yesterday, Chris wanted sandwich meat. You can find liquor at the grocery store but not sandwich meat. Well at least not what we are used to. Remember my “accept it, adapt and move on” motto? Well that was the plan. I chose to go to a small grocery store close to the deli which has ham we like. It’s expensive ham but that’s the adapt part. The decision is not which ham or which store, it is “do I want to spend this much on a sandwich?”
The small store has limited items but a good meat selection so I was able to grab some ground pork and boneless chicken breast for meals this week. Several times as I passed, a young lady asked would I like to try the fresh squeezed orange juice. I am not a big OJ fan so I passed the first two times. The thrid time I just said, “sure I’ll take two bottles.” Now, these juice bottles are a couple of cups of juice. Oranges here run about 10 pesos a piece and labor is not expensive at all. I had just grabbed a new Minute Made juice which is mango and orange. It was a one liter bottle and was 50 pesos. I thought, ok the smaller bottle might be the same price since it is hand squeezed.
I was shocked to see the smaller bottle was priced 170 pesos. TRIPLE the cost of the big bottle. So I paid $3.40 for a small bottle of juice and I had asked for TWO. Ouch - Cost of groceries in the Philippines - lesson learned: Ask how much before you decide to buy!
