Price check

Today I was a little annoyed about living in the Caribbean.

I went to the computer store to buy a black ink cartridge for our printer. It is the HP 21 printer cartridge, listed at $14.97 on Walmart.com. I paid $96EC, which is roughly the equivalent of $40 US.

Ouch.

I also paid our electric bill today. Since Liam was born we run the air conditioner pretty much all the time. The bill was $720EC or about $270US.

That's about $100 more than we paid for electricity at our slightly larger home in Texas with a 20-year-old air conditioning unit.

Double ouch.

Since I was feeling sensitive about the money flying out of my wallet, I took the time to observe that several things at the grocery store were exorbitantly priced also - shaving cream ($6US), cereal ($6US), salsa ($5US), diapers (I can't even talk about it), to name a few.

I usually don't obsess too much about the money. Some things aren't really an option, like printing out school notes, so I just accept it as the higher cost of living here.

But today I was feeling the pain. I bought some local lettuce for the equivalent of $1US and four mangoes for a mere $2US. But that didn't exactly balance things out.

The moral of this story: it is not cheap to live on an island, especially if you insist on buying imported goods. We are not exactly living in a hut catching our own fish and plucking coconuts off the trees.

Old consumer habits die hard and foreign goods aren't cheap around here. Tough lessons for anyone used to shopping in America.

At least I didn't buy the People Magazine I was eyeballing in the check-out line at IGA. $20EC, or $8US for one magazine. I think that's one thing I can live without.