Weird Things Learned From Gathering Prices All Over The World

In China, which is consider as among the cheapest in the world, (cow) cheese is usually more expensive than in Europe (and many other places). It might not be available in cities of 500.000 size! The reason for this is that Chinese people don't eat cheese and milk (apart of being young). They cannot digest lactose, milk sugar. Europeans have different digestive system, changed by centuries of eating milk and milk processed products as cheese. Cheese is actually highly processed food and is high in saturated fat and sodium and is considered not healthy for cardiovascular system. A friend of mine recently was diagnosed with cholesterol and doctor told him that was because he did drink 1 liter of milk per day (and he was also a big fan of cheese). Doctor advised him to drink soy milk instead. After looking soy milk which he finds enjoyable he found a chocolate soy milk he do enjoy and now he feels addicted to chocolate soy milk :-).

I've read that in Sri Lanka, prices of potato goes up/down +300 percent during the year.

The explanation for this weird thing was that due to high moisture it's not possible to store potato and therefore when most of potato is available it becomes cheaper and later much more expensive.

Numbeo might show that in certain cities some items are cheaper than country cheapest!

When calculating existing algorithm takes into account only entries which are not classified as spam.
Than it discards the lowest 25% of entries and highest 25% of entries.

That's why a reader of a website noticed weird thing - La Ceiba cheaper than Honduras itself! It happened because those lowest entries of La Ceiba where discarded when calculating average for Honduras.
It sounded like a plan, knowing that website relies on inputs from visitors which might not always be correct, but here it shows a kind of weakness.

In Latin America, I've read from visitors of the website that, for example in Paraguay there are two types of places to rent : 1. for foreigners, overpriced 2. for locals.

Even if you call real estate agency from Honduras you might not know the "real" price because you are out of reach for second types of apartments.

Even Numbeo data has weaknesses, if you purchase the data from provider which uses an employee to gather the data, you don't have guarantees that employee took into account:

- oscillations of price during the year

- prices for foreigners/locals

- the best representative of mid range restaurant, for example

- the best representative for each comparative item or the supermarket in general

Also, employee might make an error when collecting data as well.

Currency exchange changes during the year so comparing values is even more difficult if only in certain months data are gathered for statistical purposes.