Cigarettes & Liquor

Twister Liquor Store, Pampatar, Venezuela

At lunch today my friend Marc tells us about liquor pricing in Venezuela. He goes in a liquor store and as you might expect they have three sizes of liquor bottles: small, medium and large. Also, as you might expect, the small bottle is the cheapest, the large bottle is the most expensive and the medium size bottle falls somewhere in between. However, when he (or more likely his wife) checks the price per milliliter he is surprised to find that the small bottle is still the cheapest.

Now this is completely backwards to what we have come to expect in the US. The bigger bottle is supposed to be the "economy" size. By putting liquor in a larger bottle, the producer saves on packaging, and this cost savings is supposedly passed on to the consumer. There was even a bit of a scandal a few years ago when it was discovered that this was not necessarily the case. That is why you seen the price per ounce displayed with prices in grocery stores.

Marc asks the clerk about this, and given the language barrier and all it takes some doing, but eventually he finds out that she is aware of this discrepancy. Their logic down there is slightly different than here. Poor people can only afford to buy the small bottles, so they sell them as cheap as possible. People who have enough money ("rich people") to buy the larger bottles do not mind paying a little extra in order to get one big bottle instead of a bunch of small bottles. So they are paying for the convenience of having the big bottle. Weird.

And cigarettes? In Venezuela there is no such thing as a "carton of cigarettes" or even a pack. Cigarettes are sold individually. I have seen this in some convenience stores here a few years ago. Haven't seen it recently, but I haven't been in one either.

Update November 2016 repaired broken html