 Hi friends and subscribers, welcome back to my YouTube channel. My name is Daniel Rosal and this channel focuses on life on the ground in Jerusalem and in Israel. A good chunk of my energy over the past few months has gone into moving apartment. This really wasn't how I planned on spending my summer, however like many people who find their renting is their only means of living in a certain locality, moving has become a sort of unwanted fact of my life for pretty much the past decade. Another unwanted fact of life for me has been that visiting Ikea stores has become something of a regular ritual. You know how you make a list of everything you need only to find that you forgot about that one shelving unit you needed in that random corner of your apartment between the fridge and the balcony? This is basically the story of me and Ikea. As is well known, the cost of living in Israel is extremely high. In fact, recent data by the OECD show the prices in Israel were the highest among the organization's member states and a full 38% above the organization's average. This is a really appalling statistic that took me a while to wrap my head around. Not only is Israel effectively as expensive as Switzerland, but Israeli consumers are paying almost 40% more than those in other developed countries just to cover the cost of basic necessities like food, water, and shelter. However, when looking at the cost of living, the actual price of things is only a part of the picture. How far your money goes matters greatly too. This is captured in the idea of purchasing power which is something that the OECD index attempts to account for between countries. Economists frequently try to estimate the cost of living by deciding upon a make-believe basket of goods which are together thought to be representative of your average consumer's purchasing needs. This often makes its way into statistics as the consumer price index or the CPI. To simplify things further, economists have sometimes tried to benchmark the cost of living against pretty universal goods like the cost of a Big Mac and McDonald's. Because falafel is a staple street food throughout the Middle East, a falafel index has also been floated to try to regionalize the benchmarks. Another possible angle of attack is to look at IKEA furniture as one aspect of the cost of living. IKEA stores in 61 countries throughout the globe and many of its furniture parts have the same names in Swedish. Like in Israel, IKEA is pretty much where everybody goes in order to purchase furniture, so it's kind of almost a semi-captive audience. Fortunately for armchair commentators like me, this means that we only need to hop on a computer and change between a few VPN endpoints to get their pricing information in different countries. For the sake of this video, I decided to put together an imaginary list of five items that I might credibly require to furnish a home office. I looked up the prices of these items on the IKEA website on September 14th, 2023 at midday. So my imaginary home office basket is the Milberget office chair, the classic linman table in its 39 inch or 99 centimeter configuration. For olive adjustable table legs, these are commonly sold in combination with linman as the linman olive combination set. For storage, I decided to start to replicate the actual storage system I have in my real home office. This consists of two 226 centimeter ivar modular storage units, as well as six 42 by 50 centimeter shelves in order to give me storage. People are always telling me that my home office is drab and lifeless, so to keep those people happy, I decided to also throw in a rotblotta wall clock so that I could know the time in style. This definitely isn't a purchasing list for the Rolls Royce of home offices, but then again, if I were looking to furnish the Rolls Royce of home offices, I probably wouldn't be shopping for furniture at IKEA. Rather, I thought it would be a kind of credible home office shopping list for a student or a first time homeowner. Anyway, here are the screenshots and for the sake of comparison, I'm converting everything to the US dollar, the same time as I took these screenshots. Please note that IKEA says that the prices that appear online are supposed to be the same as those available in bricks and mortar locations, although it doesn't guarantee that this will actually be the case. So the online prices are more like indications of the RRP you'll find in the stores, rather than guarantees as to that. Finally, I used a VPN to attempt to get around the geolocation related redirect and attempt to find the same prices as are available to consumers in these actual localities. In IKEA Israel, the cost of the Milberget office desk was 695 shackles. We'll compare that into dollars shortly. For the Linman table, it was 95 shackles for the 100x60cm version and the Linman olive combination together cost 335 shackles for the 160cm table and 4 legs The 226cm side unit for the IVAR modular storage system would set me back 150 shackles when I took the screenshots. Finally, for a 42x30cm shelf, the cost for one of these was 45 shackles per unit. The Rotblota clock I mentioned was 195 shackles. Swapping my VPN over into a US point, I got the following prices at the exact same time of taking the screenshots. The Milberget chair cost $129.99. The Linman table top cost $24.99 and the version with the four olive legs sold as a set was $84.99. The IVAR side unit this time denominated in inches but the same dimensions was $30 and one of those pine IVAR shelves retailed for $7.50. The Rotblota clock to finish off the home office buy was $39.99. Finally, moving into Ikea Ireland by changing to an Irish VPN point and browsing on the Ikea Ireland website, I was able to get the following prices for the same basket of home office essentials. Our swivel chair, the Milberget cost €129. The Linman table top was €20 for the 100x60 version and for the Linman olive set with the four legs in white, it was €70. The side unit for the IVAR 226x30cm would have cost €17 from Ikea in Ireland and it was €7 even for each of the 42x30cm shelves. Finally, the Rotblota wall clock cost €40. I put all this data into a spreadsheet to see exactly how much more the items in Israel were costing. Summing up everything, my total bill in shackles would have been 1,515 shackles. At the time of doing this cost comparison, that worked out to be $396.27 so really just shy of 400 bucks. However, the same basket of goods if I was shopping in an American Ikea only came to $317.46 so it was almost $100 more. In Ireland this basket of goods came to €283 which at the same time that I did the foreign exchange rates came out to $302.81 versus $317.46. The cost in US dollars of the order in Israel was $396 so this was a price difference of $93.46 or again almost $100 cheaper to buy the same basket of goods in Ikea in Ireland. After doing the currency conversion calculations we can see that some of the price differences in goods are really substantial. For instance, when I took the prices the Milberget office chair was 695 shackles which came to $180.70. However in the US that was $1,299. That means that the price in Israel was almost 40% higher than the price in the US. The same chair in Ireland cost €129 which works out to be or worked out to be $130 so again we're seeing a price difference that the same product in Israel costs 31% more than Ikea in Ireland. Averaging out the price difference between the basket of goods in Israel and the same products in the US we see that the Israeli store costs on average 25% more than in the US and the difference was more marketed when benchmarking against the Irish Ikea on average the difference in Israel was 1.42. In other words the Israeli Ikea was 42% more expensive than Ikea Ireland for the exact same products. This is of course just a basket of goods intended to represent the cost of living in Ikea but I think it does show that it is true as most people claim that the price of furniture in Ikea Israel is more expensive than in Ikea in other countries. Want to get more videos from me about the cost of living and other socioeconomic issues in Israel then please do consider liking to this video subscribing to this YouTube channel and sharing it with your friends.