Can some of you suggest the best places around the World to buy goods at the cheapest prices. If we can get a list together it may help us all to save a few pounds, dollars or yen.
I am looking to buy a new Sony Vaio computer and Canon EOS camera/lenses. Anyone like to start this topic off with suggestions as to what country, or even actual names of suppliers and their websites.

Costco

Cool idea and right up my alley.

Roesle cooking tools - Germany (I've got pieces for $30 in the US that are $5 there)

Most other cooking tools and chef's clothing/clogs, etc. - Les Halles area of Paris

Versace/Rosenthal china - Germany (cup and saucer that are $179 in the US can be had for $44 there)

Fisher & Paykel appliances - New Zealand (saved about 60 percent)

Sony noise-canceling headphones - buy at NRT

Majolica from Deruta - Deruta, Italy savings of 30-50 percent

Hermes products - Paris (that huge department store with three initials that I can't think of.) They also have great prices on things like Hansgroehe faucets.

Neuhaus chocolates - Belgium

Japanese woodworking tools and lots of other cool stuff - Tokyu Hands, Tokyo (this has got to be one of the coolest stores ever)

My son bought a lot of CDs cheap in Singapore

Glass in Venice

My husband bought a camera lens in Singapore he thinks he got a good deal on ... he did a lot of bargaining though.

Oh yeah, my elephant art was about a 10th the price in Bangkok that they sell it for here in California.

I'm currently looking for the best deals on pure linen sheets, preferably French or Italian. Any suggestions?

One tip is to check the eBay boards of other countries - i.e. eBay Deutschland, etc. I've had to correspond in German with all the people I've purchased from and shipping is more, but I've saved a lot too.




[This message has been edited by letiole (edited 12-03-2002).]

Now that this Nikon man has stopped gagging, the cheapest place for most photo equipment is B&H at 34th and 9th in NYC. Cheaper than anywhere I've been in SE Asia.

There's a store called "Nikon World" at one end of the Ginza in Tokyo that has a ridiculous selection of used Nikon equipment. Maybe there's a similar Canon store somewhere else.

I was in Deruta in October and didn't buy any big pieces of majolica (since I like to travel light and don't like to carry fragile things), but DID buy 5 cork bottle stoppers with majolica tops -- small, light, and easy to carry. My "token" Deruta purchase, I guess you could say.

And could the department store in Paris be BHV (Bazar de l'Hotel de Ville)? It's across from the Hotel de Ville (city hall) and I bought the cutest little porcelain-enameled metal signs there a few years ago. Some of them said "Defense de Fumer" in black letters on white, and others are miniature street signs, such as "Avenue des Champs-Elysees" and so on. I gave some as Christmas gifts and kept some.

I'm not really a big shopper when I travel, but sometimes go in for handicrafts, textiles, artsy, or off-beat stuff (like the miniature signs). For colorful handmade textiles, go to Guatemala and Panama!

Kathy

Asia's Best Buys
By Eric Bellman

07/21/2000
The Asian Wall Street Journal

[Each week, our 'Arbitrage' feature gives Asia's best price for a sought-after product. Now, Eric Bellman looks back, distills the trends and offers a guide for savvy shoppers]

Maiko Harada has a nose for shopping. Twice a year, she flies from Tokyo to Hong Kong for a four-day spree, picking up Bruno Magli sandals, Prada bags or Louis Vuitton accessories.

"I'll go months without shopping so I can go crazy in Hong Kong," she says. Ms. Harada, 27, a maitre d'at a French restaurant, says Hong Kong has better selection and she figures she saves 20% or so over Tokyo prices.

But is she missing the best buys? Could be.

Since April 1999, Personal Journal has sent journalists on a virtual regionwide shopping spree, hitting stores from Seoul to New Delhi to find retail prices for everything from Christian Dior perfume and Cartier watches to Philips' big-screen televisions and back-saving Herman Miller Aeron chairs. Week after week, our "Arbitrage" feature has highlighted the Asian price spread on these items -- discrepancies big enough in many cases that buyers in some markets could afford to fly business class across the region to make a purchase and still save money over the local price.

Now, after 64 rounds of Arbitrage, we've crunched the numbers and identified some trends that can save you money. Among our findings: Tokyo , perhaps not surprisingly, had the highest prices on our "basket" of goods, with Seoul a distant second. New Delhi and Seoul had the most expensive electronics, Manila and Shanghai the priciest sport and leisure products.

And the cheapest city in our survey? Think twice about Hong Kong, Ms. Harada. Kuala Lumpur emerged with the best prices overall on the items we tracked, thanks in part to its inexpensive alcohol. Singapore was close behind, with the best deals on sporting goods, perfume, watches and other luxury goods. In both of those cities, the products we chose were, on average, around 14% cheaper than the average regionwide price. Hong Kong was third, with prices of about 8% cheaper than average.

Tetsuji Ueno, an associate director at ABN Amro Securities (Japan) Ltd., wasn't surprised by our results. He says he and his wife spend up to $20,000 abroad some years on clothing, shoes, watches and cufflinks. When it comes to clothes, says Mr. Ueno, 39, many of the flashier designs aren't available in Japan, and many big-ticket items there cost more than twice as much in Tokyo as elsewhere in the region. "The further away from Japan it is, the cheaper it gets," he says.

That's generally true, according to our findings. A Tokyo resident like Mr. Ueno, for example, could save $500 by leaving town to buy a brand-name leather carrier for his notebook computer: When we priced Alfred Dunhill's London Style laptop case in April 2000, it sold for $1,330 in Tokyo , but could be found for $830 in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore , Hong Kong and Manila. And the potential savings aren't limited to those living in Japan. A resident of Thailand, Korea or Taiwan could have flown to Singapore in June to buy a Bose Lifestyle 50 Home Theater System for roughly $3,300. That was at least $2,000 less than it would have cost to buy the surround-sound, CD-and-speaker combo back home -- enough to cover airfare, with lots left over for hotel and dinner with a nice bottle of wine.

On the subject of bottles, we found that alcohol and perfume had the broadest range of prices: In October 1999, 100 ml of Christian Dior J'adore eau de parfum ranged from $66 in Singapore (25% below average) to $149 in Tokyo (70% above). A broad variance from cheapest to expensive also tended to show up in inexpensive items. Some books and CDs in Tokyo , for example, cost three times their Jakarta price.

Expensive items, such as luxury watches and electronics, tended to have smaller price variations. But even these items present huge potential savings. Philips' 42-inch FlatTV, featured in July 1999, had one of the narrowest price spreads. But with models in Bangkok or Sydney going for around $19,000 (15% above average), shoppers in those cities would have saved more $5,000 to $6,000 by flying to Hong Kong (19% below average) to buy one. (Of course, they'd also have to deal with the cost of bringing the large item home and paying any duties -- which can run higher than 50% of the ticket price in some countries).

Why the big deviation in prices on the same product? We asked some of the manufacturers whose products have been featured in Arbitrage to tell us; most wouldn't discuss their pricing strategies, or said it was up to local outlets and retailers to set the prices.

"The yen cost of a Sony product when it leaves Japan is basically the same no matter where it is going," says Naoki Fujita, a spokesman at Sony Corp. "It's nonsense" to ask the companies why prices vary, because there are so many factors that affect the price tag after the product leaves the factory.

Companies like Sony also pointed out the obvious -- that a lot of the variation in price can be attributed to shipping, tariffs, distribution, shop rental, advertising, and wages of those managing the stores and manning the cash registers. With prices gathered in 12 separate countries, it's little wonder the deviations are large.

Another factor affecting the final price tag: The openness and competitiveness of a given economy. Economies that often discourage cutthroat price wars -- Japan and Korea come to mind -- tend to be more expensive. Structural barriers also add to costs: High tariffs and quotas, slow customs clearance or a dearth of good roads and ports boost the price for the consumer, as we see in the high price for imported electronics in India.

And for Japan, there are further complications. On one hand, it is home to a large group of affluent, brand-conscious consumers who will pay anything to get the latest Salvatore Ferragamo shoes or the trendiest Hello Kitty cell phones, analysts say. On the other, it has an economy that isn't consumer-friendly: High rents, a surplus of middlemen, retailers that sometimes act like cartels, and a lack of consumer-rights groups translates into higher prices. In the end, it shows that the expected benefits of restructuring of Japan's economy -- by way of mergers, bankruptcies and deregulation -- isn't yet trickling down to the consumer.

"The structure of the economy artificially inflates prices," says Ron Bevacqua, an economist at Commerz Securities (Japan) Co. who is also a long-time Tokyo resident and a globetrotting shopper. "There's a reason the Japanese spend like crazy when they are abroad: They get hosed at home."

Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are cheap, by contrast, because they both have relatively good infrastructure, low import tariffs and higher competitiveness, analysts say. Low rents are another deciding factor. The regional slowdown knocked the wind out of demand for retail space in Kuala Lumpur and slammed rents, says Tan Min Lan, an economist at Merrill Lynch Singapore . Lower rents may also be the main reason Singapore was able to beat out Hong Kong , she says.

Indeed, Hong Kong is losing its traditional position as a shopping magnet, anecdotal evidence suggests. Some shoppers have figured out on their own that they can get more Bally bags for their buck in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur.

"Everyone used to go to Hong Kong to shop," says Joi Natividad, general manager of the Horizon Hotel in Manila. "Now very few of my friends go there."

Ms. Natividad, who says she spends around $5,000 a year shopping abroad, says she was also surprised on a recent visit to Kuala Lumpur. "Everything is cheaper there."

But price isn't everything. The other key for jetsetting shoppers: Selection. On that count, New Delhi and Shanghai are at the bottom of the list, with 22 and 23 items available, respectively, out of 64. On the other end, 62 of the items we chose were available in Hong Kong , while 55 were available in Singapore and 49 in Kuala Lumpur.

That's why Pauline Loong, a recruiting manager at Andersen Consulting, thinks Singapore has the edge -- even though she lives in the cheapest city of our survey, Kuala Lumpur. "You can't compare KL shopping," she says, "to the experience in Singapore or Hong Kong."

Plus, no matter where you live, there are benefits of shopping elsewhere, says Ms. Natividad: You can pick up something your friends can't get at home, and have mementos of your trip. "I'm not a T-shirt kind of person," she says. "In Hong Kong , I bought Gucci shoes. In Kuala Lumpur I bought my Canon camera, and in Singapore , my Palm Pilot ..."

---

Who's Got It

Low prices are great, but only if you can find the item you want. Out of the past 64 Arbitrage picks, here's how many were available in each market. One caveat: Most of the items were selected from Personal
Journal's home base of Hong Kong , which, as visitors know, has no shortage of retailers. Nonetheless, the numbers are reflective of each city's selection vis-a-vis Hong Kong.

Hong Kong...62
Singapore...55
Tokyo...54
Taipei...51
Manila...49
Kuala Lumpur...49
Bangkok...49
Seoul...46
Sydney...45
Jakarta...33
Shanghai...23
New Delhi...22

---

The regional Arbitrage team: Kevin Voigt (Hong Kong), Montira Narkvichien (Bangkok), Puspa Madani (Jakarta); Hsien-Kuei Lee (Kuala Lumpur), Josephine Cuneta (Manila), Rasul Bailay (New Delhi), Meeyoung Song (Seoul), Lily Shen and Claire Zhi (Shanghai), Caroline Tedoen (Singapore), Ambereen Choudhury (Sydney), Nina Lin (Taipei), Miho Inada and Hiroko Fujita (Tokyo).

How It Works

We choose one product each week, and journalists in 12 bureaus of The Asian Wall Street Journal and The Wall Street Journal price them at three centrally located retailers in each city. We're not looking for the lowest prices in town -- there are outlets, presumably, where some of the items could be found more cheaply; our aim is to find retailers in areas where our readers are likely to shop. The prices -- which include all local taxes -- are converted to U.S. dollars at the exchange rate published in The Asian Wall Street Journal on the Tuesday of the publishing week.

For the present exercise, we took the 64 goods priced over the last 15 months and calculated the simple average price for each product. Next we calculated the deviation from the average (again expressed as a percentage) for each item in each city.

Then we sorted items into groups -- electronics, perfume, sport and leisure, watches, luxury leather goods, alcohol, media products -- and calculated how each city measured up within a product group. For example, three of the watches we priced in Singapore were 25%, 22%, 17% below the average regional price for those watches, and one was 1% above the regional average. The average of these: 16% below the average regional price.

Our overall rating was calculated the same way: We averaged together all of the average deviations for each city, giving each product the same weighting in our final ranking of cities.

Granted, this was not a balanced survey, and it shouldn't be taken as an index of overall prices in each city. Week after week, we prioritized big-ticket items, like luxury goods and gadgets. Twenty items, or nearly one-third of our sample, were electronics items -- music systems, computers and peripherals, portable organizers, cameras and other gadgets -- so our regionwide number is weighted toward those products. Sprinkled in for variety are food items (Starbucks coffee), services (shirt laundering) and small consumer items (film, movie admission tickets).

One of the challenges of Arbitrage is finding products that are available in all 12 Asian cities; indeed, it happened just nine times. So for the averages presented here, we chose not to penalize markets where items were unavailable. In the electronics category, for example, all 20 items could be found in Hong Kong, while only seven were available in New Delhi. Hong Kong's average, then, is the average of the deviations on those 20 items, while New Delhi's is an average of the deviation for seven items only. Finally, if less than two items were available in any city in any category, that city was eliminated from the category.

(See accompanying illustration -- AWSJ July 21, 2000)

[Edited because italics sucks]

[This message has been edited by Toxa (edited 12-03-2002).]

Yes, that's the one! We're redoing much of our house and down in the basement they have a wonderful hardware selection. We had a great time buying faucets that even if you could find them in the US would cost a small fortune. Best part was the threads match those on our existing plumbing.

Speaking of remodels and more good buys - we got a Blanco sink in Germany for $200. Same model here is about $650.

Also ... I've been finding just through eBay that tennis rackets seem to be a whole lot cheaper in Canada. My tennis coach says it wasn't like that when he lived there but I just bought two rackets - a Dunlog 200G and a Babolat Pure Drive - for 25 percent less than I could have gotten them in the US.

Interesting story toxa. How I would have loved a reporting assignment like that one.

[This message has been edited by letiole (edited 12-03-2002).]

Topdog

You can't go wrong shopping in Canada unless you live here. The US Dollar and the British Pound buy a lot of merchandise in Canadian $, then Americans and Europeans get all the tax we pay (15% here in Ontario) rebated on purchases they take home.

Add to this that Toronto is an extremely competitive market for the items you are seeking. Almost makes a trip here worthwhile.

I wish we got the whole thing back - PST is not eligible for refund, except in those places where the whole thing is charged as a harmonized sales tax.

In Ontario, the amount eligible is only the GST. Still isn't a bad deal - unless you're not spending the required C$200.

Mike

Hmm. And I was just in a Rosenthal China shop in Krakow, Poland and walked away with nothing since I thought it was pricey and very breakable. Nice stuff, though.

I think everyone should buy/vacation in Canada (Left Coast of course)

Canada, like Mexico, only you can speak the language and drink the water...

I find Canadian water cold.

Actually on your average purchase you are correct, however on a major item such as the computer or camera described you could avoid paying the PST in the first place by proving you were going to export the item. Not the sort of thing to pursue with the checkout clerk at Best Buy, but something that could be arranged with advance planning.

VAT back is a great deal for frequent flyers/shoppers.

South Africa is one of the best places in the world to shop. I can't think of another country with the triumvirate of a depressed economy, high inflation and a significant middle class. This means that general goods that you actually want to buy are cheaper than anywhere else in the world. Other countries that are poor with no middle class don't have such cheap shopping for quality goods.

That said, going to the source is usually a good bet. Ideas such as glassware in Italy, cashmere in Scotland, etc. are good.

sorry to be redundant but it's true.

COSTCO