Cost of living comparison

comparing manila and bangkok cost of living according to numbeo.com

Sign at Wat Pho or Temple of the Reclining Buddha in Thailand

Coffee anyone?

Here in Bangkok, there are coffeeshops and coffee stands everywhere. From Starbucks to the humble coffee stand in the corner, they are often crowded with customers.
I am not a big coffee fan, I just drink coffee if I badly need an energy boost ( but chocolate is always my first option) or I need to stay awake. But here I began frequenting the coffee shops, and ironically not because of their coffee. Here are the reasons why:
- most of the crew can speak good English or at least knows the english name of their products.
- most of them have free wifi, Coffee World in Patpong has the wifi password posted in each of the tables. Doi Tung also has free wifi but you have to request password from the cashier and lasts for an hour.
- give you some kind of "peace" away from the bustle of the city

However, I feel uneasy when I become regular costumers. Why?
- in Coffeeworld, the manager has become comfortable in seeing me everyday that she doesn't give me the obligatory warm greeting or kop kun kaa when I leave. Oftentimes, she is smirking at me.
- in Doi Tung, when the crew sees me at the cashier, they have the weird smile and oftentimes exchange looks as if to say " here is the foreigner again who looks like a local"
- in Swiss cafe, I don't like the constant small talks of the manager/ supervisor. Sometimes I am tempted to say, I came here for the food not the talk. I also wonder if she just uses me to practice her English.

Of course, I am different from other people, there are those who love the attention when they come to a place, or the small talks offered to them. But what can I say, I am not like most people.

Sale!!!

Everyone loves shopping sale or promotions. Especially women, sometimes we even end up buying things we don't need just because its on sale. Oftentimes too, we no longer evaluate if the product is worth the price and become completely blinded by the note in the tag price which says "70% off".
I had an economics teacher in college who told us once in our class not to be fooled by "sale"or "promotion" items. She said that most of the items that are on sale with tags as high as 70-80% off are actually being sold at the same price during off sale season and sometimes higher than its regular price. She knows this because she once worked for a department store and know the said practice. At that time that she revealed this to us, although I believed her, I did not take it very seriously thinking to myself "maybe because that department store is not upscale and barely anyone notices their regular prices so they try to resort to such dirty tactics".
In the Philippines, I have not personally observed or noticed such tactic. But sometimes and when I say sometimes it means 2 out of 10 instances, I evaluate the items if they are worth the price or the sale price is suspicious. I was reading the blog Fashion Pulis, and one of his readers shared an incident in a popular mall when she noticed that the sale price is higher than the regular price. Yes, she noticed because she tried to peel off the sale price to see what was the tag price before it supposedly went on sale. When she confronted the saleslady and eventually the store supervisor explained to her that it was just a case of mistagging. Hmmm.. Okay...
Here in Bangkok, sales or as they promotions are overflowing which is obviously why many tourists consider the city a shopping haven. Of course there is always the inevitable different price if you're a foreigner which admittedly happens in other countries too. But there's something strange that I observe when checking out items on sale. One time, I was checking items that are being sold in the streets, the sign says" Buy 1 29 baht, buy 2 59 baht. I had to read the sign more than twice to check if I was reading it correctly, then I have to check my math 29x2 = 58. Okay, so instead of getting a bigger discount for buyinh more you actually get robbed of an extra 1 baht. At least the vendor did not try to hide her tactic, its just for you to detect it.

At the grocery in a shopping mall in siam, I once saw dishwashing liquids grouped into 3. The marks are in thai ( so I maybe wrong here) but I assumed it says buy the 3 items to save. So I checked the price of a single item, 28 baht and the bundled items 84 baht. I had to call my husband to check my math and we eventually ended up doing math in the air. And yes, 28x3=84.

Moral lesson: Dont be an impulse buyer, check the price and not how much "discount" you're supposedly getting. Because you might actually be robbing yourself instead of saving.