SHOPPING

Dutch website translation (translation is fairly accurate)

Here it is, September 12, 2003, nearly 11 months since our day of arrival in the sleepy town of Weesp, the Netherlands.  (For those who don't know, Weesp is about 4 miles east of Amsterdam.)  Anyway, my first thought when arriving in a new place is where the cheapest stores are, and when we asked the manager (Karl) of the place we're staying, he said C1000 was the cheapest grocery store.   Which, we found, turned out to be true...

But some funny things have been happening since we first started shopping at C1000 in October of 2002.  C1000 in itself is not a cheap store, but it's the cheap brands that they carry.  So, we compared prices on the items, and found the cheapest ones available.  The first item we noticed was a "generic" chocolate bar wrapped with simple red paper that says in white letters "Chocolade puur" (pure chocolate).  0,19 Euro cents for 75g of chocolate can't even beat WalMart's $0.33 deals for Snickers (or so I thought).  So for months we happily bought our cheap bargains, until one day the price went up a few cents for the chocolate.  It didn't seem like much at the time, but then other items were raised a few cents, or were simply replaced with more expensive items.

I just figured that C1000 decided to "hike" the prices on their cheapest items,
since us Americans (who should have lots of money) were only buying these items. 

By the way, for those who aren't familiar
with the Dutch's attitude towards money,
this may seem like a conspiracy theory,
and it may be just that, but it seems so odd
that the items we buy most regularly are the ones being raised. 

Conspiracy theory aside (though we talk about it jokingly), we continued to pay the higher prices.
And then, today, the receipt read 1,59 Euro for what used to be 1,19 Euro eggs.  Hey, that's a difference of 0,40 Euro cents!

For those of you who are saying "Oh, for God's sake!  What a cheap skate!  What's a few cents?"
Well, below is a table of the actual items which have been raised "just a few cents..." just see how it adds up after a month.

But hey,
I'm not really complaining,
because C1000's prices are mostly reasonable...
and they still don't even touch the sky-rocketing prices of grocery giant Albert Heijn.

So, then what's the point of this story?  Well, for me, it seems to prove what other non-natives of  the Netherlands have been telling us: the Dutch are cunning when it comes to money.  And it's also a reminder to always check your receipt, because (as in any other store on Earth), sometimes the item just "rang up" wrong!

Dutch website translation (translation is fairly accurate)

On a different note...

Since this article is about Euro's and shopping, I thought it fitting to add some insight about how the Euro has affected the Netherlands.  Well, it seems the old saying "What we have feared has come upon us" has come true for the Dutch people, and I will explain this in a minute.

Our first trip to Amsterdam was in May, 1996.  We had planned at that time to live in the Netherlands, but ended up spending a lot of money, and only ten days.  The second trip to Amsterdam was in October, 2001, and we stayed for six months (this was a very distressing time, so this story will have to be told later).   October 2001 gave us about three months to use the Guilder until the Euro would be introduced in January 2002.

For those who don't know about the Guilder, this site gives a Weesp citizens' viewpoint, and some pictures of what Guilders looked like.

Anyway...before the Euro, there was a lot of talk from the few Dutch people we did know about how the Euro was going to affect Holland.  They kept saying that the Guilder would just be the Euro...and from our mindset, we were like "Yeah, duh!"  But what they meant was that what used to be 1 Guilder would now be 1 Euro.  For those who don't know what the conversion rate was supposed to be, it was like this: Guilder amount divided by 2.2 = Euro amount.  So what was once 5 Guilders should translate to 2,27 Euros.  All went well the first few months of the transition; most stores even posted the Guilder / Euro amount so that all could see the 2.2 conversion.  But then it slowly happened...and so subtely until "what they feared had come upon them."  Now, what used to be 1 Guilder is 1 Euro!

Coming from America, the Guilder prices seemed outrageous!   Really, the only reason the Guilder prices seemed so high to me is because I was still looking at them as $dollar amounts.  For example, a bottle of wine would be 5 Guilders, which roughly translated to about $2.50.  But when I saw 5 Guilders, I immediately thought $5.00...it took some time to get used to.  Then the Euro came around, and I could see the prices as I was used to seeing them, because, at the beginning, the Euro and the Dollar were almost equal.

Now that it's almost two years after the introduction of the Euro in the Netherlands, I can see the affect of the Guilder = Euro.  Imagine (in America) what would happen if what used to be $1.00, then was supposed to be $0.45, all of a sudden shot up to $2.00.  This is, of course, a ridiculous example, but it gives an idea of what happened with the Euro.

Okay, for a better example...in October 2001, we were paying 500 Guilders for a place to live.  With the 2.2 conversion, this translated to 227 Euros.   But then, imagine if the Guilder were matched with the Euro, and instead of being 227 Euros, it was now 500 Euros!  That's nearly as much as the original Guilder amount.

Well...that's what's happened with the Guilder > Euro in the Netherlands.  The Dutch people we're around now in 2003 don't seem to consider the transition any more.  Funny how forgetful humans are to the change of yesterday.

GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT I.T