Winston wrote: ↑October 22nd, 2019, 12:37 pm
Cambodia is a cheap country. One can live well there on 500 dollars a month. So what's the logic of needing 2500 a month to get married? There's no sense in that. Marriage should not only be for the rich. Cambodian men don't need to make anything. So this is discrimination and would never be possible in America.
In Indonesia, vendors in the traditional marketplace will charge foreigners high prices. My wife and I would pretend we did not know each other in the market so the vendors would not charge up the prices. Way back when I offered a certain amount for carrots, maybe 2000. The vendor would not sell them to me for less than 5000, even though I went up to 2500. My wife got them for 2000. It's actually irrational, economically/financially, but they don't want to feel like they lose. A white friend of mine would say, "Poor white man wants discount" which is funny but works a lot better grammatically in Indonesian than when translated. They say vendors charge one price for relatives, another for people from their village, another fro people from their people-group, another for Indonesians, and another for foreigners.
I saw a documentary about a man who objected to his university accepting Nike sponsorship because they subcontracted to factories that paid low wages. He went to a poor neighborhood in Indonesia with another student who both tried to live off the salary the factories offered. His friend had to choose between eating and Panadol when she was sick. The problem with his experiment was that he would have had to pay white-man prices if he shopped in the market and was not able to get the deals the locals would. They probably had a tough time eeking out a living, but he did not seem to favor in the price premium he had to pay and the fact that some of the other families may have combined incomes in one household.
If Cambodia has a lot of traditional markets, an expat may need to make more than a local. it is also necessary to make more if you ever want to save up for a ticket. And if you get sick of rice after a while and you want to go eat a plate of pasta or a steak at a hotel, then you need the extra cash for that that a local does not need. Locals may not need toilet paper in their budget either.