Costs of ordinary items

[GRETCHEN SOLDAT]

Hi Experts,

First, thanks for the recent free audio conference on Ecuador. All your inputs were very valuable.

My husband just returned from furnishing our condo near Canoa. Though we knew to expect imported items to be higher in cost, this fact of life led to a question. How do Ecuadorians afford everyday household items like toasters, blenders, internet and the like? My first response was that they just don’t have these items. But how do I know? Do they?

We know the cost of day-to-day living is way lower in Ecuador, but initially outfitting a home is quite a bit higher for appliances and so forth. So we wondered about the locals and how they can afford these necessities on their lower income.

On an unrelated question, does anyone know why U.S. DVD’s won’t play in other countries and vice versa? I sent down a bunch of movies but didn’t send a U.S. DVD player so they won’t play on the player we purchased there. That seems weird. Thanks, all of you.

[SUZAN HASKINS]

Hi Gretchen, well-to-do and middle-class Ecuadorians will have all or some of the appliances you mention and those who aren’t as well off will not have them. Nor do they consider these types of appliances necessities. That’s why there are still internet cafes. 🙂

Here is a tutorial on DVDs: http://bestnetguru.com/winxp/dvds.html

I’ve not had a problem playing US DVDs on my Ecuador DVD player but it doesn’t surprise me that you have had this issue. It happened to us in Mexico once, so I don’t know if it’s the player or the DVDs themselves. You can buy DVDs in Ecuador really cheap so not to worry…

[COUNTRY EXPERT – WENDY DECHAMBEAU]

Hi Gretchen,

Like Suzan said most people don’t have what they consider unnecessary appliances. Fruits can be juiced by hand, clothes can be washed in a sink and hung out to dry, and who needs a coffee maker when you can buy instant granules?

As for the DVD issue, you can change the region code on your DVD player to allow it to play DVDs from other countries. The link Suzan provided is great if you’re using a computer. If you want to change the region code on a DVD player itself, my husband wrote a blog post about how to do that awhile back. http://www.why-ecuador.com/2012/10/changing-region-code-on-dvd-player.html

Hope that helps and enjoy your time in Canoa! That’s one of my favorite beach towns on the coast.

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