« Gilligan's web | Main | Von Ahn's Gwap »

Beer money

May 15, 2008

If you think the daily increases in gas prices are painful, just be glad you're not living in Zimbabwe, where the inflation's so bad that they just added a half-billion-dollar note to their currency. A contributor to the economics blog Daily Speculations reports on a recent lunch in the country:

During the meal, one of my mates was drinking beer - 750ml bottles of Castle Lager (fondly called bombers) he ordered a 5th one, was advised that the price, which when he ordered his 1st, 2nd 3rd and 4th ones was 160 million per bottle, had gone up to 340 million per bottle. That's right: During lunch - there was a price increase…

The price increase is amazing, but the beer intake is pretty impressive, too. If my calculations are right, a 750 ml bottle is a little more than two 12-oz bottles, so the guy had already downed eight beers and was heading for ten when he was so rudely interrupted by the price hike. Pretty strong effort for an economist.

Advertisement: Coming this spring: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Preorder now from Amazon.

Comments

I spent last Sat with some Zimbabweans, and saw some 250 million dollar bills. Prices now adjust 3 times daily, so if he'd been out on a weekend...

I thought Manhattan getting cheap was inflation!

Posted by: Thomas [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 15, 2008 07:08 PM

If I was a bar-owner in a country with hardly any fraud oversight, I might have a similar price curve with people that drunk too. . .
Not that inflation in Zimbabwe is not impresssive in any way.

Side note: if you order now, drink slowly and pay after the price hike, what price applies? Shouldn't the two hour debt that you are contracting be indexed somehow? It is in the bar interest to have you pay in the spot, and send a courrier to the bank deposit it all.
Same question for hotels.

Posted by: Bertil [TypeKey Profile Page] at May 20, 2008 05:31 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?


 Subscribe to Rough Type

Nick's next book:
shallowscoverthumb2.jpg

Nick's latest book: bigswitchcover2thumb.jpg "Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company

"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting stuff" -New York Post

Order from Amazon

Visit Big Switch site

Read Q&A with Nick

Greatest hits

The amorality of Web 2.0

Twitter dot dash

The engine of serendipity

The editor and the crowd

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

The great unread

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar

Flight of the wingless coffin fly

Sharecropping the long tail

The social graft

Steve's devices

MySpace's vacancy

The dingo stole my avatar

Excuse me while I blog

Other writing

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The ignorance of crowds

The recorded life

The end of corporate computing

IT doesn't matter

The parasitic blogger

The sixth force

Hypermediation

More

Nick's first book: Order from Amazon

Visit book site

Rough Type is:

Written and published by
Nicholas Carr

Designed by

JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

What?