Well, it's not the checker's fault completely - Germans are not nice waiting in lines and they get very close and often rub up against you and breathe down your neck as you're trying to bag as fast as you can, and then get your money as fast as you can while everyone scowls at you, and no one talks. I often think of the people in line behind me, "Are their houses all on fire?" I'm not the only one who thinks this, when I go to the ex pat website, all the Americans consider grocery shopping here stressful and others have talked about panic attacks too.
Going to get food is an every 2 day thing here - food is sold in smaller quantities, and kitchens are smaller. Our fridge is dorm-room sized and our kitchen doesn't have much room to store food.
Anyway, the food is locally grown for the most part, none of it has those fancy food colors and flavors (even the Coca Cola recipe is different here), and Round-up Ready is not a term here (yet!).
Here are some staples we buy and their prices:
- 1 kg (2 pounds) Sugar: 36cents
- 1 kg Flour: 39cents
- Tunafish can: 99cents
- 250 g (1 cup) Butter: 89cents
- 250 g Froze Chicken Breasts (tiny, the size of American chicken thighs): 2.39
- 750ml Austrian Wine: 1.99
- 1 liter pure OJ: .89cents
- 1 liter 1.5% Milk: 55cents (I wonder what they're feeding those cows....)
- 2 liters Mineral Water: .89cents (bottle return for 25cents)
- 1 kg Carrots: 59cents
- 1 box Peppermint Tea (20 bags): 49cents
- 750 ml Olive Oil (high quality Italian): 3.19
- 200 g Tomato Paste: 55cents
- Lettuce head: 85cents (not pictured)
- 10* Eggs (Free range, pre-cooked and colored): 1.49 (not pre-cooked: 99cents)
- Fresh Baked Bread: 1.39
Perhaps compared to Costco these are not such great prices. This is all Aldi stuff, a discounter (the food is in boxes on palettes).
Do these prices seem good to you, or is it just that everything else is so much more expensive than in America?
Finally you can get carving pumpkins at Aldi!
It's kind of sad to carve a pumpkin all alone, but Germans really don't do it.
Some of the walnuts J harvested.
I told him it looks like a crazy person lives here.: )
14 comments:
those food prices are REALLY CHEAP! Wow. And of course, we pay premium prices here for "locally grown" unless we grow it ourselves.
Our meat prices are lower here, I think? And probably subsidized, there is No Way I can raise poultry for the low cost of it in the store...of course, I won't "factory raise" birds, so that's part of the cost, but still....
Really Aarene - I'm not just imagining it, good. : )
It's sad that you cannot grow your own poultry for less than Costco prices. I do so miss the hormonally-enhanced pieces of chicken though. I tried to explain to a German butcher how big a thigh should be, and she said, "You mean, a turkey thigh?" No. A hormone-enhanced chicken one. Anyway, the thighs I paid the butcher to debone were full of tiny splinters of bone, on average - 11 bone chips per thigh - because thighs are not a thing in Germany, and asking for a special order "deboned chicken thighs" was out of their league. You don't want to know what I paid for those things, and I had to pulverize them myself one by one to remove bone splinters. Never again.
Yeah, those are good prices even in smaller sizes. I get the big cans of Albacore and it seems those are around $5 each. I find that most items in Walmart are about half the price of the same items in my local grocery store. I have to drive further to Walmart, but their aisles are wider in both the parking lot and the market, so we don't have to deal with people constantly getting in our way and bumping into us as much.
I'd love to do an experiment and ship all the Snowbirds over to Germany to shop in your markets. They would really piss off the German people. They're all retired and act like they are going to live forever, so there's no hurry to get through lines. They chat it up with cashiers long after their goods have been rung up. They drive half the speed limit. They shop every day of the week out of pure boredom and seem to take great pleasure in creating bottlenecks. When there is line of people waiting for their table in restaurants, they purposefully sit there for an hour after finishing their meal because they have nowhere more interesting to go.
Wow, that is cheap! A dozen eggs here are $2.00 from my neighbor, pricier at the grocery store.
Wow, that is cheap! A dozen eggs here are $2.00 from my neighbor, pricier at the grocery store.
That sounds super cheap to me, but of course I'm north of the border! Agree with Aarene, meat prices are maybe on the high side, depending on quality/source.
on 60 minutes last night there was a segment on recent syrian immigrants in Germany. Asked why you only see men, and they said the men come over first to try and make money, and a little bit of a life, before they try and bring women and children, elderly. Hope to buy a safer way for them to get out then on the rafts.
CHEAP FOOD!!!
I guess it makes up for the horses being so expensive - seeing the cost of the ponies you shop gives me heartburn.
Your pumpkin is goooorgeous :)
NM, I lol'd when I read "they shop out of sheer boredom" - I can't imagine. Hey, you shouldn't mention fancy things like Albacore which doesn't exist here - not nice! Or what I wouldn't give for a can of chicken to make chicken salad from. and and and
Camryn, you get fresh eggs from a neighbor for cheaper than the store!? Lucky.
T, omg did you see that video online about how Vancouver is sick of never portraying itself in movies and TV? You don't have to be from Vancouver to laugh at this, I don't think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU
Chicago, thanks for sharing that. I was guessing that was the reason too. The laws changed this week and more people seeking economic relief will be sent back, and people escaping war conditions will be placed in homes more quickly. Now how to tell them apart when they lie about who they are.....
Becky, thank you! So I guess it's true then - food and alcohol are the only things cheaper in Germany.
Those prices sound pretty cheap to me...especially in USD. Right now, 1 USD is about $1.30 or so Canadian. In the summer, you may be able to get a head of lettuce for $1-2 at a farmer's market and more than that in the winter when produce is trucked in from far away lands. :-) Our dairy, chicken and beef are expensive these days, especially beef. This week in the grocery store, you would pay .99 per pound of tomatoes or cucumbers; tuna is on sale for $2 each (a savings of $1.59!). A dozen eggs (sold by the dozen, Canada is metric also...!) with omega 3 added is on sale for $4.99. Generic white eggs are probably cheaper. Here is a link to the sale flyer if you are interested: http://www.sobeys.com/en/flyer/?f=20132&f=undefined
Those price are super cheap, but I live in California where everything is over-priced. We were SHOCKED at the low prices of groceries when we were in Portugal this summer. We shopped for a lot of things since we stayed in several apartments. Here, 18 eggs are more than $7.00!
I don't see what is misleading. The point of the blog post was:
Go and buy food for 111 US$ in America. Then go and buy food for 100 Euros (=111 US$) in Germany. Where do you get more? And how much more?
Some facts about the comment of MaCor5:
@5: Food is regularly taxed 7% in Germany. We just came home shopping, and the only item on the receipt with a 19% tax is wine. Everything else: 7%.
To be point-on accurate on the conversion, you have to divide by 1.07 (because in the US there is not VAT included in the prices on price tags) and multiply by 1.10175 for the current exchange rate (right now on google). Doing the math shows: you have to add less than 3% to all mentioned numbers. That's not too much of a difference, it's 3 cents per Euro.
(side note: if MaCor5 would have been right about her VAT of 19%, then you had to subtract 7% of the mentioned prices... they would have been misleadingly too high)
@2: To say "prices stayed the same so items for 1 DM now cost 1 Euro", is a generalization that is simply not true for most goods (but yes, there were a few). I remember milk was like 1DM (=0,51 Euro), and it is 0,55 Euro today. That's less than normal inflation.
And I don't get the point why this is misleading - even if it was like this, prices are still low compared to the US.
@4: average income tax is NOT 40%. That's just plain wrong.
The highest tax rate in Germany is currently at 42% (even more if you make >250,000 Euro). The more you make, the higher your percentage. 40% is reached when you make about 50.000 Euro per year. The average income in Germany is less than 45,000 Euro (depending on the source and the way of calculation). Because no one pays taxes on the first 8,355 Euro of their income, it's even less tax in relation to what you make. If you only make 9,000 you pay like 15% on 645 Euros (thats less than 2% on 9,000 Euros). And the richest people definitely don't pay less than 645 Euros.
Again I don't get the point.
When I go to America, I think groceries are expensive compared to Germany.
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Last important note: As far as I know, food is cheap in Germany (especially agricultural products), because it is subsidized to prevent imports and keep the European farmers in business.
~J
Very interesting. Now some questions.... Precooked eggs?? They are already cooked?? What if you need a raw egg for a recipe? I'm so confused lol.
Yes, I hate shopping, Germans really cannot stand in line. The worst thing is when they push their cart in your butt. I really have to hold on me and try to tell them friendly that it won't make it faster when they do that...
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