Laundry: The standard price for wash/fold for a shirt appears to be $ 1.00 ea. at the laundries near my hotel. At my local laundry in Thailand, I pay B 500 for 80 pieces for wash/iron service or B 6.25 ea. ($ .20 ea.). So, as one would expect, a service that is almost all made up of a labour input costs is much cheaper in LOS...in this case, 1/5th the cost.
Famous Sundae: Anyone born and raised in East Bay, or attended UC Berkeley, will be familiar with Fenton's Ice Creamery. It is a Bay Area institution. Their ice cream sundaes are justifiably famous and HUGE and there is no analogue to one of these beasts in Thailand. If you took the largest sundae on Swenson's menu and trippled it's size, you would have something approaching a Fenton's "Black and Tan." However, the quality of the ice cream and toppings would pale in comparison. In any case, purely in the interests of gathering accurate information to add to this thread, I subjected my waistline to the abuse of consuming one of the afore mentioned Black and Tans today! Cost of this decadent pleasure: $ 8.25. I believe the large (3-scoop) sundaes at Swenson's in Thailand cost B 129 ($ 4.00) or about half the cost of the Fenton's creation. Again, however, to even approach the size (but not the quality) of the Fenton's sundae, you would have to order 3 of them ...so it would come out to B 387 ($ 12.00).
Gas: The San Fransisco Bay Area has the highest gas prices in America. This is due to a number of factors...in any case, the current price is basically $ 4.00 per gallon at local stations for "regular," which is probably the closest to Thailand's 91 gas in octane content. Now, I know to my European based readers, this will seem incredibly cheap and for you it is but for my fellow Americans it is very expensive. The average price around the country, according to the reports on TV and in the papers, is around $ 3.75 a gallon.
The last time I filled up in Pattaya, gow-nueng (91 octane) was B 31 a litre. This equals B 118 PER GALLON (31x3.8=118), which converts to $ 3.69 per gallon. (I think I did the math right here...please correct if wrong. I think there are 3.8 litres to a gallon.) So the price of this fungible commodity is about the same, to slightly cheaper, in LOS if compared to the USA countrywide average price, which is not subject to the special environmental and formulation mandates of gas sold in California.
Electronics: Went to check out Best Buy electronics today to buy some DVDs and check on the prices of computers and electronics. Some interesting results here. Now, Apple has a fairly uniform pricing policy around the world I believe, so there is not too much variation in the MSRP from country to country. I guess price would be affected by any local imprort duties and tariffs and local dealer mark-ups.
Apple products are a good price comparison item because their specs are more or less fixed (sorta like the Big Macs of computers), unlike most WinTel based machines. The Black Mac Book 160 HD, 2 GIG RAM was $ 1300 or B 41,600. Can someone in LOS provide the current prices at shops there? The white Sony Vaio T8100 250HD 3GIG RAM 14.1 notebook was $ 1250 or B 40,000. A Linksys wireless router 100 MBPS was $ 50.00 or B 1600. I purchased a Toshiba 320 MB 2.5" external HD for $ 130 or B 4160.
Things were more favorable on DVD pricing (and I am only concerned here with genuine DVDs). In Thailand, I recently purchased the boxed sets of The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, the BBC nature documentaries. I think I paid B 600 and B 900 for them...really great prices. At Best Buy, Blue Planet was $ 60 (B 1920) and a combined set of both series was $ 90.00 (B 2880). I saved big money buying my sets in Thailand. I go through allot of reams of computer printer paper in Thailand. It costs from B 100-B 130 ($ 3.00-$ 4.00) depending on paper weight. Thie paper at Office Max cost $ 7.00-$ 7.80 (B 224-B 250) a ream. I had no idea there would be such a discrepancy in price on such an item, with LOS being less than half the Stateside price, nor do I have any explanation why this would be so. Ink jet printer cartridges were $ 15.00-$ 25.00 dollars. I don't know what model/price would be for my Thai Epson printer but I buy my cartridges at Tuk Com Pattaya for B 200 BW and B 325 colour ($ 6.25- $ 10.10).
.. more cost comparisons between Thailand and San Francisco page 4
