I see Francis has gone all Angry Anderson - I see a trend!

Drifter wrote: it depends, i would say that in genera the prices have gone up 20% in the last 4 years if we talk about food you can buy at markets and supermarkets.

cigarettes up 10-15%, gasoline is stable, guesthouses and hotels from 20 to 50% in some cases, booze +10-15% for beer cans in minimarkets but not much for draft beers in bars.

i heard the 3$ BBQ in snooky's beach is now 4$, that's a whopping +30% in 4 yrs .. 6-7% per annum, on par with PP.

on the other side, airplanes are a bit cheaper thanks to AirAsia and other carriers, transportation is still affordable.
we're still very far from the inflation that hit thailand after 2008 !

Perhaps Drifter......as you correctly say, it depends on the product. But don't forget, that we had already a massive increase of prices at the beginning of this year when the PM put the import tax up. Result was an average increase of 20 % and prices are still going up........within the last 3 month the price for e.g. ARA cigarettes has increased 20 % on top of that ......and so on, and so on. So if you say the inflation rate is only 20 % in 4 years.........then this is hard to believe. At least the felt inflation is more like a 50 % per year.

StroppyChops wrote:I see Francis has gone all Angry Anderson - I see a trend!

A trend ??? Which one ?......tell me.

A musical theme in your avatars... you're right, two in a row is an oddity, it takes three to make a trend.

Suggestion for your next change:

I hate that fuckin' ass popper.......couldn't sing either.

Francis wrote:Perhaps Drifter......as you correctly say, it depends on the product. But don't forget, that we had already a massive increase of prices at the beginning of this year when the PM put the import tax up. Result was an average increase of 20 % and prices are still going up........within the last 3 month the price for e.g. ARA cigarettes has increased 20 % on top of that ......and so on, and so on. So if you say the inflation rate is only 20 % in 4 years.........then this is hard to believe. At least the felt inflation is more like a 50 % per year.

i remember buying a box of L&M at Samudera in 2010 for 4.5$, now it's 6$ (bayon) and in some places it's almost 7$ (lucky market).
wines were as cheap as 3$ per bottle, now there's nothing below 5$.

milk, flour, eggs, all priced on par with the West or even a bit more.

what's going up fast is the rental prices in PP and especially in downtown.

all in all i wouldn't be surprised if the cost of living in vietnam is a bit cheaper than here now.

for cambodia, the growing middle class with more purchasing power is going to trigger significant inflation. especially at higher end establishments (vs street food vendors). both will raise, because the cost of ingredients will go up from demand, but the higher end places will amplify it more as they'll still shoot at a profit as a % of cost rather than simply raise the price by the cost difference.

OrangeDragon wrote:for cambodia, the growing middle class with more purchasing power is going to trigger significant inflation. especially at higher end establishments (vs street food vendors). both will raise, because the cost of ingredients will go up from demand, but the higher end places will amplify it more as they'll still shoot at a profit as a % of cost rather than simply raise the price by the cost difference.

not only that.
i'm seeing a worrying trend in some supermarkets where they don't stock anymore the cheapest western products but they only offer expensive australian or french products, this is true in particular for Bayon Market but the same can be observed at Lucky Market.

and nobody is selling cheap vietnamese wine, i would like to know exactly why as this makes no sense to me considering they've no problems sell vietnamese milk and much more.

supermarkets stock what sells from the range of what they can get. those cheap brands (magic time for example) sucked and i imagine frequently didn't sell well. so they stop stocking them. bayon has always been sort of higher end on that stuff... as have the people who shopped there.

the viet wine is probably a byproduct of the big (fake so far as i have seen) scare over poisoned wine coming from vietnam. surely they meant the rice wine, but it easily could have spread to table wines via the power of suggestion.

phuketrichard wrote:been seeing that for years,
prices have gone up for everything here ( ingredients and dishes)

I eat at the local market and what was 25 baht 3 years ago is now 40 and smaller sizes

Anyway, back to Thailand . . . Yes, PR, Thai meals are now running 40 baht 90% of the time this year. And that's at Thai food stalls. I haven't really noticed shrinking portions but they could very well be smaller.

Having a GF with a soup stand (and a previous GF who opened a Thai restaurant in the boonies of Jomtien), I know intimately how little money is made by Thai food vendors even now. While ingredients take up about 60-70% of the cost of a meal, the other costs are at the location: market rent, electric, water, cooking gas and manual labour take most of the rest. In fact, I think most food vendors make a subsistence living, walking away from 12-15 hours of work with 200 baht in their pocket. Very few make a good living and it's only because they have non-stop customers all day long.

As far as meal price, they should be selling their meals and soups at 50 baht and more but then many Thai people couldn't afford to eat. A vicious circle.