There’s No Such Thing as Low Cost of Living

The world isn’t cheaper. People are just paid less.

Photo from LiDL by wineplusclub.com

I didn’t learn this from an economics book. I learned it from a Lidl receipt.

The world loves to talk about “cheap countries” and “expensive countries” like that’s a natural law. Like some nations are just blessed with low prices and others are cursed with high ones.

But when you actually live between places, you start noticing the lie isn’t subtle.

It’s sitting on the shelf, staring at you with a barcode.

In the Netherlands — a country people warn you about like it’s a financial horror movie — I could walk into Lidl and grab a bottle of Malbec and something decent to eat with it for around four bucks. Shrimp. Greek cheese. Whatever the week’s little “I’m not suffering today” item was.

Four dollars.

In Morocco, four dollars doesn’t get you half a bottle of cheap Spanish wine. Not even close.

And before anyone starts doing the classic coping move — “well, wine is a luxury there” — no. Wine is grocery. Here and there. It’s sugar + yeast + time. That’s it. The romance is marketing. The “luxury” is a decision made by systems, not by grapes.

So why the hell is “basic fermented liquid” cheaper in a top-tier European country than in a so-called low-cost one?

Because “cost of living” isn’t really about prices.

It’s about power.

And my Lidl bottle was basically a small window into how power works.

People say “Europe is expensive” because rent is expensive. Because childcare is expensive. Because taxes look scary on paper. Fine.

But groceries tell a different story. Groceries are where the system shows its real strength or weakness, because groceries depend on things that countries either do well or don’t:

distribution, competition, regulation, scale, and logistics.

The Netherlands is a machine built for moving stuff. It has ports, roads, warehouses, cold chains, and a retail culture where supermarkets fight like wolves over your €0.30. Lidl doesn’t win by being cute. Lidl wins by being boring and massive: fewer choices, gigantic purchasing contracts, and supply chains that run like a factory.

So the Malbec is cheap because the system behind it is ruthless and efficient.

Morocco doesn’t run groceries the same way — not at that scale, not with that level of competition in every category, and not with the same frictionless pipeline for imported goods.

And wine, specifically, isn’t just “a bottle.” It’s a regulated product. Not necessarily “rare,” but structurally different from tomatoes. Different channels. Different restrictions. Different taxes. Smaller market volume. Less price war. More friction.

And friction is what you pay for.

So the price isn’t about grapes. It’s about how hard it is for a bottle to legally exist in your hand.

That’s the first pillar of my experience: a country can be “cheap” and still have expensive groceries when the system is inefficient, restricted, or fragmented.

All kind of random food for €0.25 in a LiDL Store (Netherlands)

The second pillar is more brutal: wages are part of price.

Not in the moral sense. In the mechanical sense.

In the Netherlands, “€15 an hour is a joke” isn’t even a flex — it’s almost the baseline now. The legal minimum wage for an adult is about €14.71/hour as of January 1, 2026.

In Morocco, the minimum wage is far lower (and a lot of people earn under or around it).

And this is where the usual cost-of-living talk becomes comedy.

Because someone in a top dog country can walk into Lidl and buy that bottle with a small slice of an hour. They’re not thinking. They’re not negotiating with their budget. It’s just… groceries.

In a lower-wage country, even if some things are cheaper, anything that’s taxed, restricted, imported, or sold through narrow channels can become a much bigger percentage of a day’s labor.

So the real cost isn’t $4.

The real cost is: how many hours of your life does that bottle require?

And when you calculate it that way, the “cheap country” myth starts losing its teeth.

Because a country isn’t cheap if the people inside it have to spend half a day’s effort for what another country buys in twenty minutes.

That’s not cheap. That’s just low numbers sitting on top of low wages.

Now comes the part the Lidl scene exposes: the world has basically two categories.

Not first world / third world. That’s old language.

The real categories are:

1. Countries where the system is built to move goods efficiently and competition keeps retail pricing tight.
2. Countries where friction, regulation, and fragmented distribution add invisible costs to everyday items.

And what makes it confusing is that both can exist inside the same country depending on the product.

Morocco can absolutely be “cheap” for local basics. But if a product is imported, restricted, taxed, or sold through limited channels, the country’s “cheapness” stops mattering. The system takes over.

So when I say “there’s no such thing as a lower cost of living country,” what I am really saying is:

There are countries where your money has authority, and countries where your money has to think & prioritize.

In the Netherlands, money walks in and picks up groceries like it owns the place. In Morocco, money sometimes gets stopped at the door by invisible policies, markups, and market structure — and you pay for the conversation.

And this is why this experience is more honest than 10,000 travel blogs.

Because travel blogs compare prices the way tourists compare sunsets: emotionally, out of context, and with their own foreign income doing the heavy lifting.

They go: “Lunch is $2! This country is so cheap!”

Yeah. Cheap to who?

To the locals making a fraction of what you make, that $2 can still be meaningful. The price tag doesn’t tell the truth. Purchasing power does.

The Lidl bottle is the perfect example because wine is normal. It’s not a car. It’s not rent. It’s not healthcare. It’s a grocery item.

So when groceries are cheaper in the “expensive” country, it tells you the real divide isn’t the sticker.

It’s the system.

And the system decides who gets to treat basic things as basic.

So if I had to write the whole point in one clean sentence, it’s this:

There aren’t “cheap countries.” There are countries where wages and logistics make normal life affordable — and countries where you can live among cheap prices but still can’t buy normal groceries without feeling it.

And I didn’t learn that from economists.

I learned it from a Malbec Bottle and Lidl.

And from the insult of realizing that four dollars can buy you a small human life in one place and almost nothing in another.