I don't think it's "ripping off" tourists to ask them to pay a price they can easily afford rather than the usual local price, ridiculously low for a tourist.
replyI cringe when I hear Europeans proud that they haggled to death on an African market to lower the price from "cheap" to "dirt cheap". Dude, that's pocket change for you, can't you help the local economy a bit, and help the guy feed his family?
In Washington DC, don't buy ice cream from the trucks in the national mall.
reply> As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back home".
replyIs this a joke? $10 for a single scoop of ice cream in the US is a lot of money and also the US minimum wage is only $7.25/hour. You can barely feed yourself with the US minimum wage and you definitely can't pay for shelter or healthcare or anything else you would need to survive here, but that's a story for another time.
The current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after acquiring). But currently, they have to advertise that their starting salary for workers near me is $14/hr because if they don't they won't get anyone. Politicians like to talk about raising the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever as if that would suddenly give working class people a huge raise, but it would simply reflect the existing reality.
reply