It's been 10 months, and I still am adjusting to prices here. Today while grocery shopping I thought I'd go peruse the makeup aisle for fun, maybe pick up a few things. Then I looked at the prices, and turned right around and walked away. Whatever happened to $5 lip gloss?? Not to mention that the lighting in the makeup section was friggin atrocious. What's the use of having samples available to test if you can't even trust the colors to look right? So I figured, once again, if I was gonna pay Sephora prices I might as well get Sephora products and did some shopping online, only to get my order rejected twice b/c of problems with payment information or something. Which is really really weird. I'll have to ask Zach if he knows of anything funky going on with the amex card, or maybe the website was just having a glitch. Either way, I took it as a sign. I have to say, I just don't understand what makes the prices so different. For funsies I compared prices on the US and the French Sephora websites, and let me tell you especially with the exchange rate what it is there's no excuse for a $27 product to cost 34euros in France. That comes out to, what, $50 just b/c it's being sold overseas? BOOOO, I say.
I dunno. Maybe at some point I should just let go and deal with it. This was my problem with housing in California. There was a point in that first year after we moved there that Zach and I were semi-seriously talking about buying a condo, and even went to look at a place or 2, and I just kept comparing the tiny 1-bedroom places we were looking at to my mom's 4-bedroom, 2,500sq ft house in Texas, that was the same price, and just couldn't do it. I'm sure we would've come out quite nicely financially at the end of that deal with how much prices went up in the 2 years after that, but then again we would've also had no money to do any of the fun things we did while living there, so I still think it was for the best.
Of course, this all continues now with baby-related shopping as well. I needed to buy a nursing bra to have on hand, and bit the bullet with paying 55chf for the cheapest, most simple bra available the other day. Just not many other options (the only cheaper one I found was at C&A and had clasps that were insanely complicated to do and undo). We've managed to import a lot of baby stuff from the US, but my guess is there'll be plenty more things we'll just have to pay the high prices for (btw I have done some price comparisons between here and France and when you do the conversion it's virtually the same prices). *Sigh* I guess I shouldn't be complaining, I'm living in friggin Europe. Besides this will just make everything feel really economical when we move back to the states, right? ; )
Is any of this stuff things you could tell us to get for you, and we can ship them? I'll be happy to buy you nursing bras, but I don't know if that's something you could just tell me what size to get, or if you'd really need to try them on and play with them. And stuff.
ReplyDeleteBut if you find something you like that's available here, let me know. Shipping is much less than I thought it would be.
I was pretty shocked when I was recently looking at the price of baby gear in CH. There's some stuff there that I prefer (style of stroller, for example), but wow! At one store I didn't see any strollers less than 800CHF. Ouch.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand,wine and cheese is so much cheaper there than in the US. So I stick to those items ;-)
btw - re: the nursing bras, don't buy more than one in advance, as your size is likely to change a lot once Loki is here. I'm small enough that at home I basically went without a bra all the time (and was topless too for a long time while we got the hang of nursing). I had a bunch of tank tops with 'shelf' type bras that worked well for when I went out or for sleeping. They hold the pads in (I leaked a lot) and were more comfortable than bras. I didn't buy more nursing bras til I went back to work.