Help! I Spend All My Money on Milk! South Korea’s Extortionate Grocery Prices

My little boy Rowan is nearly two. He loves to drink milk. Milk for breakfast, milk for lunch, milk for dinner. I try my best to limit his intake, not just for his health but for the benefit of my bank balance.

You see, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about money and I’ve been trying to work out why I’m always broke. Yes, I have a family to support and there are clearly expenses involved, but I don’t have any pricey hobbies, I’m not into clothes or computer games and I don’t go out drinking every night of the week. So where does the cash go? Well, it turns out I’m making supermarket owners across the land extremely happy. According to the US Department of Agriculture, in 2020, American consumers on average spent a measly 5% of their incomes on food from supermarkets. In the UK the number was similar. I can tell you right now, it’s significantly more than that in South Korea!

The Price of Milk

Numbeo, a site that collects global cost-of-living data, puts the average price of a litre (approx. 1/3 of a gallon) of milk in South Korea at $2.10. “So what?” you say. “Seems reasonable to me.” Well, to put that into perspective, this much milk would set you back around $1.25 in the UK, and in the US it’s even cheaper at a measly 86¢ per litre. By the way, this is not special, organic, locally sourced, free-range milk from grass-fed, massaged cows we’re talking about, just regular, bog-standard white stuff.

Bloody hell. When I found this out, I decided to do a little more digging. Using the websites of the 3 leading supermarket chains in each country (Korea, the US and the UK) I put together a small basket of what I consider to be ‘everyday essentials’ and then compared the prices of the individual items in each country. The items chosen were: one litre of milk, a loaf of bread, one cucumber, one banana, one avocado, 1kg of mild cheddar cheese, a medium-sized jar of peanut butter, 1kg of chicken breast and 1kg of ribeye steak. I felt that these would give a fair representation of the prices in different food groups while being reasonably representative of an average shopper’s basket.

A couple of points to bear in mind: Where possible, I tried to choose the cheapest option for each item, as that’s what I often pick up when I’m shopping. There may also be some minor discrepancies due to imperial-metric conversions. Finally, I used XE Currency Exchange to convert prices between currencies, which are correct as of August 2021.

Let’s get to the prices.

Findings

Fruit and Veg

Starting with the fruit and veg, Korea actually has the cheapest cucumbers of the lot. Yay! A win for Korea. One cucumber costs 51¢ in Korea, 59¢ in the UK and 68¢ in the US. Things, however, move swiftly downhill from here. A single banana in a Korean supermarket will set you back 61¢. 61! In the UK and US, they’re 18¢ and 10¢ respectively. So bananas in Korea are six times more expensive than the US. That’s, well, bananas! Avocados in Korea are also pricey, at around $1.70 per fruit, where the same item would only set you back 90¢ in the US and $1.16 in the UK.

Photo by Sven Scheuermeier on Unsplash

Store-cupboard Staples

Staple items like peanut butter and cheese fared little better, with a regular-sized jar of the brown stuff coming in at a whopping $4.42 in the Korean supermarket. You’d pay around $3 in the UK and only $2.30 in the US for the same size jar. Cheddar cheese is $9 per kg in Korea and around $7 per kg in the US and UK. Bread is around $1.50 a loaf in the UK and slightly more in the US. A small loaf of bread in a Korean supermarket costs more like $3. Phew. I’m really starting to see where my salary goes each month.

Photo by Camila Levita on Unsplash

Meat

Finally, let’s have a look at what costs the most- meat. Fresh chicken breast in the US is $4.40 per kg while in the UK, the same amount costs around $7. In Korea, however, it’s more like $10. My eyes are starting to water. Finally, the priciest item of the lot; steak. One kilo of ribeye steak in Korea is $29, whereas in the UK and US it’s significantly cheaper at $23 and $24 respectively.

Photo by SHOT on Unsplash

Almost all of the food items in our basket were much more expensive in Korea than they were in either the US or UK. But why?

The Most Expensive Country in Asia

Photo by Capturing the human heart. on Unsplash

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s look at the reasons why things are so much more expensive here. According to Numbeo, Seoul is the most expensive city in Asia for buying groceries. It has a grocery price index of 105.73. That makes it the sixth most expensive place in the world to go supermarket shopping. The only country where things are pricier is Switzerland, with all top 5 spots being taken by Swiss cities. Major Asian cities such as Tokyo (87.72), Hong Kong (79.74) and Shanghai (52.82) lag behind Seoul by a huge margin. But what are the reasons for this?

According to Wikipedia, “the natural resources required for agriculture in South Korea are not abundant. Two thirds of the country are mountains and hills. Arable land only accounts for 22 percent of the country’s land.” This is compounded by the fact that small-scale farming operations are commonplace, making produce more expensive than it would be in the USA or Europe where competition between enormous cooperatives drives the price down.

Secondly, according to the Joongang Daily newspaper, “the retail industry attributes the prices to two causes: The effects of monsoons and typhoons and the coronavirus pandemic.” It points out that the producers of fruit and vegetables have had it tough recently with climate change coming into play. Long monsoon seasons and copious typhoons dealt apple and onion harvests an especially harsh blow.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Finally, there is a dearth of imported fruit in Korean supermarkets. Due to a strict quota system and a preference amongst Korean consumers for home-grown produce, the majority of the stuff on the shelves here is ‘Made in Korea’. With high demand and low supply, it’s not surprising the prices are as high as they are.

Final Thoughts

Obviously, there are some Korean staples that are cheaper here than they would be in the US or UK. Certain types of local specialities and traditional foods such as kimchi are cheaper. There are also some types of fish that are cheap when bought at local covered markets. On the whole though, I’m consistently horrified by our grocery bills each month. So what’s to be done?

Well, the good news is that eating out in restaurants is fairly cheap here. It remains a mystery as to how they source cheap produce, but still, eating out more was an option. That was until Covid came along and temporarily put the kibosh on that. So until things open back up properly here, we’ll just have to learn to budget, stretch our leftovers and teach Rowan to drink what comes free out of the tap, rather than the liquid gold he loves so much.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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