American movies are a great reminder of just how insanely expensive the city we live in is. Yesterday I was watching the film "Friends with Money".
Jennifer Aniston’s character reproaches her friend: "You refuse to lend me money, yet you’re buying your kid French shoes for $80!!" According to the script, the friend is very rich. In one of the earlier scenes she says she’s going to give $2 million to charity. So the mention of $80 children’s shoes is clearly meant to highlight what a spendthrift she is. So I asked my wife how much children’s shoes cost now (she recently bought some for our daughter to wear to school). Well, in an ordinary children’s store in Maryino, a residential district of Moscow, children’s shoes cost 2,200–2,600 rubles on average. That is, more than $100. Some cost 3,700 rubles, which is $150. This is a store in Maryino, not Zhukovka (an ultra-wealthy Moscow suburb). Completely ordinary people shop there. And I also remember my wife once watching an episode of "Sex and the City." So I sat down to watch with her—the episode was funny. There Sarah Jessica Parker’s character was agonizing, suffering and agonizing some more. She desperately wanted to buy a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes. But everyone agreed they were ***insanely expensive. ***They cost either $350 or $400. I don’t know about Manolo Blahnik, but the cheapest men’s shoes at TSUM (a luxury department store in central Moscow) cost 10,000 rubles = $410. All right, let’s say TSUM is an expensive store, but even in any regular shoe store, men’s shoes for $500 are not displayed on some red velvet pedestal. That’s not some exclusive snakeskin item—it’s just ordinary shoes. Some Carlo Pazolini or whatever. So how does that happen? We live in a poor country. Most of the population are absolutely destitute. And yet we’re forced to buy things at prices that make American millionaires lose their minds.