The Most Expensive Places To Buy Everything

Ever paid 10 dollars for coffee or 9 dollars a gallon for gas? These are the places where that crumpled wad of bills in your pocket won't buy you squat.

Coffee: Oslo.

iPhone: Russia.

McDonald's: Venezuela.

Movies: Tokyo.

Gas: Hong Kong.

Flowers: Australia.

Cars: Singapore.

Sneakers: Russia.

Cigarettes: Melbourne.

Bread: Caracas.

Fancy Hotels: Sydney.

Jeans: Moscow.

Office Space: Hong Kong.

Rental Cars: France.

Magazines: Japan.

Health Insurance: United States.

All data taken from Deutsche Bank Markets Research's recently released report, "The Random Walk: Mapping The World's Prices 2013" [PDF], that examined changing prices of common goods and services around the world. Within the report, all local prices were converted to US dollars for comparison, and all high prices shown were the top reported prices in their individual categories. The cause of price discrepancies across countries for comparable products varies — for commodities like iPhones or Big Macs, price differences are largely a result of skewed exchange rates. For others, labor costs, regulations, and other local factors drive up prices.

Correction: The most expensive movie tickets are sold in Tokyo. An earlier version of this post misstated this fact. An earlier version of this post also included public transportation prices, but source data in that category appears unreliable, so it has been removed.

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