Shopping in the DR - First Impressions

The Dominican Republic is a poor country to begin with. This must be clearly understood or nothing wonderful can come of this story. Oops, that's from A Christmas Carol. Wrong story. Nevertheless, given all the poor people I wonder about the high prices and high taxes. 

One of these days we may become fluent in Dominican Peso prices, but so far we are still laboriously translating everything from pesos to dollars. The exchange rate is roughly 42 pesos to the dollar. So, when looking at a price, say 120 pesos, we would naturally simply move the decimal point one place to the left, so 120 becomes 12, then divide by 4, so 120 pesos is about 3 dollars. Pretty easy, right? But, there is this pesky 18% tax on everything. So, to really figure out what something is going to cost, we divide by 3 instead of 4. Hence, something listed for 120 pesos actually costs about 4 dollars when you add in the tax. Very annoying. 

One would think prices would be somewhat lower where people are poor. A one liter box of 1% shelf milk (ultra-pasteurized milk in a box that doesn't need to be put in the fridge) has a listed price of about 55 pesos. After tax that would be 64.9 pesos. Four of those, a little more than a gallon, is 259.60 pesos or about US$6.18, which is a little more than twice what we pay at home. 

A regular little bottle of salad dressing is about $6.00. A bag of potato chips is $6.50. Gas is over $6.00 a gallon, but as we haven't bought gas yet, I'm not sure what it really costs after tax. I'm sure we'll have that happy experience one day soon.

La Sirena - This store is sort of like a smallish WalMart with groceries. Go into a walmart, reduce the store size and contents by about a third, double all the prices, and put everything in Spanish and that would be about like La Sirena. The small one is close to our house and is on the way home from work, so we have been there several times. We got light bulbs, a little Christmas tree, and our Thanksgiving turkey breast ($21.00) there. On Wednesdays they have all their produce on sale, so that is understandably a big event. Produce consists of such things as mangoes and avocados and many things I don't recognize. Plantains, of course, and bananas of different varieties are plentiful. What is it with dried fish? Yeesh.

PriceSmart - Almost a clone of Costco. We got our membership cards the other day so now we're full blown PriceSmart shoppers. We bought a case of shelf milk. A bucket with a ringer for a mop (without the mop) was going to cost about $200.00 so we passed up that opportunity. I'm still hoping to find a Swiffer - preferably for some price that doesn't make me choke. A 3 pound bag of Hershey's miniatures was $25.00. We passed that one up as well. A 90 oz. bottle of Dawn dish washing liquid was $13.00. The Ghirardeli six pack of triple chocolate brownie mix was $19.00. We may have to do that one anyway. We passed up a lot of things. However, on the way out we got a couple slices of pizza - two bucks each - really good.

Ikea - Yes, they have meat balls. But they put gravy on the french fries. Not bad, by the way.

Agora Mall - This four level rich people's shopping experience is reminiscent of the snooty malls in Virginia where you feel you have to dress up before you'd dare enter. Apparently there are some wealthy people living here - people with so much money they would actually buy stuff in those stores. Go figure. Anyway, we've heard rumors that the big malls and some of the really big new apartment buildings are largely built with drug money. That must be it.

Transporting oneself between these venues is quite another adventure, suitable for another post some day. And so, as Tiny Tim observed, more or less, Heaven help us, every one.