Montreal Pet Hates
I love many things about this city except for a couple of small issues, and funnily enough, the top three things which have annoyed me most to-date are all related to money. I'd been thinking about writing on these for a while, but it took a $7 bag of grapes to finally push me over the edge. So, here goes.
Firstly, the tax is not always included in the prices you see. This isn't such a bad thing, apart from the fact that some places include the tax and some don't, and it's a bit of a shock to be hit with a 15% tax at the cashier. The inconsistency is confusing, and I'd even begun to appreciate the GST in Australia, where the GST is included in the price if the item is taxable, and your receipt shows the amount of GST you have paid. Confusion for that system arises, for example, when you have to pay GST if you are eating in at a restaurant but not otherwise, so you see two different prices for the same menu item. However, you always see the true price of what you would be paying for, and I guess I've been spoiled by that.
The second thing which gets on my goat is the Canadian currency, specifically, the coins. The coins are: $2, $1, 25 cents, 10 cents, 5 cents, and 1 cent. For the first week or so, I kept confusing the 10-cent and the 5-cent, but after much retraining to remember that the puny coin is really the 10-cent, I now confuse the 25-cent and the 5-cent given their similar sizes. It doesn't help that the number written on the coin is much too small to be read in a hurry when you are struggling for change at the cashier.
Now I shall tell you the story of the $7 bag of grapes. It turns out that at the Metro supermarket at du Parc, the prices of vegetables and fruits are shown in pounds, eventhough you get charged in kilograms at the cashier. Later on, I realised that the price in kilograms is also shown, but have a look at relative font sizes. I sniff a marketing ploy. It wasn't the price of grapes that I was annoyed about, it was more that the purchasing process seems to be wrought with unpleasant and unnecessary surprises. I'm normally pretty good at estimating how much I would need to pay at the cashier, and I was not particularly impressed to find that the bag of grapes was worth a fifth of my grocery shopping today only after I have paid for everything. Well, I got a refund, so that was one good thing.
Posted by sniffles at October 07, 2002 09:10 PM