In my corner of the first-world, I'm paying:
* €6/mo mobile carrier with unlimited calls and what used to be 8 GB of data, but got raised (permanently without extra cost, across all customers) to 15 GB on last June. Paying a bit more could get you an "unlimited" plan.
* €10/mo for 500 Mbps fiber optic home internet, could be 750 for €15 but really I don't see the need for more speed. (How do you pay "10x more [than $10]" for Internet? That's crazy)
* Cinema is "expensive" at €12, while a premium IMAX costs around €16 (I guess, haven't gone in a while)
* Curiously enough, eating out does cost €20 per person for a "nothing special" restaurant meal; around €30 per person starts getting very nice.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp
This is the broadband page.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/prices_by_country.jsp?...
https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
Made by Hans Rosling (among others)
1. Four lines on Google Fi is about $220 per month for “Unlimited”.
2. Comcast is $95 per month for 1Gbps.
3. A regular cinema ticket is $22.83 to the nearest movie theater and that isnt a "premium" thing like IMAX.
For about that price you can get a monthly subscription to a lot of local cinemas and unlimited viewings here. In my city all three cinemas are in this system so we just go see a movie whenever we want. Doesn't include IMAX ones and chains of course.
Slapping sales tax on before the final price (but after the price in your head) is one of America's less charming quirks. No one else in the entire world does it.
I have very cheap electricity. If I compared other prices to my electrical bill, I couldn't purchase food, gas, Internet, or anything really. Because I'd say they are "absurdly high prices".
It's pushed me in the other direction, away from subscriptions. For most things, if I see that it's being sold as a subscription, I just walk away. Obviously this doesn't work for internet service, etc., but it's possible to avoid for most things.
PS. Some of these fine people are still living in 1940s and 50s and maybe even the 70s (read Davos etc), or have lenses from that time that they are fitting in their worldview glasses.
And $10 is about 1% of your monthly income in your example numbers, meaning it's perfectly fine also for somebody making $10 000 per year.
> And $10 is about 1% of your monthly income in your example numbers, meaning it's perfectly fine also for somebody making $10 000 per year.
What on Earth? Ok I'll bite. $70 is about 1% of median monthly income for someone making $80K/yr, meaning it's perfectly fine for somebody with the median US income, by your own logic. Would you pay $70/mo for a search engine?
And no, no one should stop making their products. No idea how you'd come to that conclusion after reading my comment (that said, companies could definitely stand to introduce regional pricing).
In many countries car is not something essential thanks to public transport.
And some people [who own a car] actually stop using one when prices for gas go over the bar unless they absolutely have to.
Is that true in many entire countries? It seems like most of the countries I've visited, there are usually places within the country where transit isn't very good, and if you point at a map and say "I want to visit this part of the county" the answer is "You should rent a car, because there's no good transit connection there."
I absolutely believe this to be true in many cities, though.