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this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Wtf, $8 for 8-10 pieces of sushi is really cheap, lol. Around here that's more like €12+, for eight of the small ones, at a not very fancy place. Food in general has gotten really expensive. I used to be able to get a Döner for €3,50 in 2010, now they're almost €10. A lot of that increase happened in the past five years.
Tbf, I've not had it all year, so who knows now, lol. It's a little "fast food" style sushi joint about an hour away in a strip mall with a dollar store, so I wasn't thinking about the rapid inflation, this year! Still , 12€ is a lot! I imagine that place's money is made in volume, not price. And they make the rolls so fast, that guy made my last Cali roll in less than three minutes!
You won't get a kebab here for $10, even before the price increases.
A small gyro also about an hour away used to be about $8, I can't begin to imagine what that cost would be now. But my last Costco trip had center cut lamb chops at $7.49/lb, much less than any beef, including 1.34 lbs at $29.50, a tenth less pound of bison being the same price as ground beef. Fortunately, chicken is still affordable if it's not organic. And pork is kind of affordable.
Edited for punctuation
Maybe sushi is the exception. Maybe it's just more expensive here because it's still considered more of a "luxury delicacy" than it is over there.
In general i always hear from Americans that groceries are more expensive there than they are in Europe, though i can't say that i find groceries cheap here. Grocery prices have also increased a lot here since Covid. It also depends where you are in Europe. I think our prices in Germany are somewhere in the middle as far as Europe goes.
I do the shopping for a two person household but it's sort of hard to quantify how much i spend exactly on groceries because it varies a lot by how often i go shopping and how much i buy, and one month can be very different than the next.
Very rough estimate would be €50 for smaller weekly shopping of perishables and then once a month another larger €150 trip to the grocery store to stock up on things that last longer. Which i guess averages to around €100 per week for food and some other minor necessities. It's definitely a lot more than it was ten years ago.
And yeah, meat is expensive here too. I never buy beef because it's too expensive but for chicken it starts at €9/kg which works out to...uh... $5/lbs maybe? Quality is generally pretty good in Europe even for the cheapest products, i guess that's the one big advantage. And bread, fresh bread is still pretty cheap. And beer, though i don't really drink. Everything else has gotten expensive.
When my friend lived in Germany a couple of decades ago, I was always shocked at grocery and weed prices, when they told me. I'm shocked when you told me! But for two people, that cost seems extraordinarily reasonable.
Our bread is trash, to be honest. I bet even baking fresh would be not great since good flour would be hard to source and crazily expensive.
You also have to remember that European incomes are lower on average than US incomes, especially after your various taxes and social contributions get subtracted.
Rents i think are in general still lower in Germany than they are in the US, though relative to the incomes it's still not cheap and they are constantly increasing every year, however energy costs are way higher. Compared to just five years ago our heating bill now is a nightmare.
And there is also a huge wealth disparity and disparity in cost of living between different European countries, though the cost of living disparity is actually less than the wealth disparity which is a real problem for the poorer EU members.
For example, since joining the EU, due to the common market, costs of basic products in Romania have almost reached the level of products in wealthier western European countries like Germany, while incomes in Romania are nowhere close to western European incomes.
Even as defenders of the EU sing the EU's praises and claim that the EU makes the countries that join it richer, the reality is often much more complicated. Yes it made some people rich, and these people now get to go on expensive vacations all across Europe multiple times a year and buy imported luxury goods.
But for the majority of working people the improvement was not really felt. It just increased the rate of emigration and allowed more people to move to richer EU countries, especially the most highly skilled and educated people, which is a serious loss for these already poorer countries.
I don't know how i got to venting about the EU again from the topic of costs of living. Sorry. I tend to go on tangents sometimes.
It's a loss for non- and less affluent in both states, and a win for the most affluent of both, from my perspective, lessening upward mobility in the state where the more skilled and educated emigrated and opening the door to workers visa for even lower paid but higher skilled from even poorer states in the other, thus limiting training and upward mobility there.
Are you vying for my tangent crown?
Anyway it's tangential, and I probably was guilty first and it's all baked into the larger topic, more for the obscenely wealthy, at the expense of the obscenely poor, and any regular worker is always one crises away from becoming obscenely poor, whether that crises is physical, mental, or an unexpected expense. I'm guessing most here are younger than myself and praying that my generation hasn't left those behind me an unsalvageable mess, because I'm guilty too, of blissful ignorance and fancying myself clever, having bought the propaganda wholesale, for far too long. I pray for any small contribution I may make to become part of a greater shift in direction, for everyone.