After having travelled to the UK recently it is hard not to compare the value of money and what certain thigs cost in each country. This morning I took my sons car in for a quick car wash which did not involve me cleaning it personally.
If you look at the above photo which I took at a Tesco (UK) I did a double take as I have never seen a self service car wash station before. Those of you that live in the UK will think this is normal for everyone around the world, but this is not the case. I took this photo from some distance off so as not to let the couple think I had plans of stealing their car or something along those lines.
This self service machine has an individual payment for water, soap and I guess possibly polish and a vacuum. This couple was there when I arrived and when I left so this took them a good 40 minutes. The standard car wash without the interior costs around 6 GBP and this you do yourself.
My sons car needed the exterior and interior done along with polishing which cost me R75 or around 3.50 GBP with the slight difference there were 4 people working at various times on the car for 1 hour. This sounds kind of crazy and shows you where the cost of labor varies in different countries. The high unemployment in SA currently is around the 40-50% mark and having any job is cherished.
The UK is a self service and if you had staff members working on this you would most likely pay in excess of 20 GBP. This is nearly 6 x the difference for something most South Africans take for granted and why most do not clean their own car.
Most SA homes have a decent sized garden along with hose pipes, but the hassle of doing it yourself when you can get it done by a team of people doesn't really justify your time. With the cost of the water, soap and polish that you would have to invest in besides the time 3.50 GBP is sounding like a real bargain even if we think this price is competitive. If they charged the UK's price of 6 GBP most people would do it themselves and the car wash business would dry up losing many more jobs for the unskilled.
I gave the guys a tip after they had completed the wash as I can only imagine what these guys and girls are getting paid. Normally if I see something as being a bargain or on the cheap side I will always tend to throw some extra money for the staff.
The lifestyles of the UK and South Africa are so different with what money can buy and to think we often complain with what we have. The cheap labor in SA allows people to live a totally different lifestyle and another example would be the majority of houses have what we would call maids or housekeepers who do all the cleaning. This would only be for the super rich in the UK because the price of employing a domestic worker would be out of the reach for the average person.
