We’ve been figuring out for the last few months how much things cost. The obvious price-hikes we’re now painfully aware of: anything Western comes with a double digit mark-up, anything Local is dollars and cents. My cup of coffee in the morning, a regular filter coffee, nothing fancy, is S$4. Malay Kopi in a bag? One dollar thirty (and that’s if you want milk, black it’s 80 cents). Six inch Subway sandwich, turkey, 6 grams of fat, very healthy, weighs in at a hefty S$5.50. My noodles and veggies at lunch are a dollar eighty. The expats are a captive market, one that, for convenience sake, continues to pay the bucks.
One market that is infinitely more ruthless in its pursuit of elastic pricing, a real slave to supply and demand, is the world of maternity paraphernalia. Good grief have the owners of Mothercare and the competition figured out that Westies will pay top dollar for the smallest little thing that ensures their overall pregnancy experience is just like their Mum’s or their Grandmother’s.
Maternity chairs, perfect for rocking your baby into a dreamful feed, seem to be only sold by Mothercare. Given that there are only three versions from one supplier, the price is about four times that of a US or AU supplier that you could buy on-line...if you could only ship it here! A colleague from work with many frequent-flyer bonuses managed to fly a cot and a chair from the US to the UK a while back in his bonus weight allowance. A very smart solution if your job takes you back ‘home’ every few weeks.
An even more extreme example that penalises all mums is the maternity bra. A two-pack is a staggering S$80 from family friendly (but profit hungry) Mothercare but in sunny Sydney we picked up the same for S$20.
It’s as uneven a pricing table as I think I’ve ever experienced. It’s like one of those old-time hawker centre guys with a pole across his shoulders; on one side high in the air is a box of noodles and on the other, scraping the ground, is a cast-iron stove complete with coal. I used to moan about the inflated commuter tickets on the British Railways, but this is painful.
Another place where pricing could do with a little help is around this whole specialist maternity hospital construct. We selected Mount Elizabeth, a shiny place with an exotic fish-tank in the lobby, just off Orchard Road, where no one seems able to give us a straight answer on the cost of anything to do with the birthing experience. We have a ‘quote’ for the birth, which I accept, given that no one knows what we’ll need from the point of “it’s coming” onwards. But no one can put a dollar figure on any part of it. We were referred to the special ambulance service for the hospital, but even they couldn’t tell us how much it was to get us to the maternity ward in case we needed the emergency ride.
Another friend of ours who gave birth recently at the same hospital experienced a 60% increase on her budgeted delivery but to this day cannot tell us what exactly the increase is for. As a result, we’re scurrying the cash away in these last few weeks to ensure we’re covered for the birth.
Having kids over here, without the safety net of good private medical, which mostly considers pregnancy to be a pre-existing condition (unless you’re insured before hand) is an expensive life-style choice.
Shovel
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