And what, having made the necessary adjustments, is the average annual Danish household income in American dollarydoos?
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And what, having made the necessary adjustments, is the average annual Danish household income in American dollarydoos?
He could well be right that the mean Danish household does. It wouldn't be far off at any rate.
But jeray would also be right that the typical Danish salary is more like half that.
Median is better for describing the typical person. Mean is better for the whole economy. The difference indicates how much skew or wealth gap there might be.
Individual wages and salaries is better for looking at jobs and recruitment. Household is better for seeing how living standards are in general.
Well, that is false. According to Statistics Denmark (https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/indkomster), the average pre-tax income for a person was 308144DKK per year, which comes to around 44000 USD per year.
39k krone a month is about 67k US a year, which if we take a chunk off for being mean rather than median starts to look right. It looks even more right with Tornadoli's numbers. Its still high, but you do have high taxes and living costs after all.
But his numbers aren't right. The average mean salary in Denmark is around 44000k USD. Still high compared to the vast majority of countries, but definitely not in the range of calling 70kUSD a year a low salary.
Explain this paragraph, from the report you cited:
Lønmodtagerne på det danske arbejdsmarked tjener i gennemsnit 243
kr. i timen, svarende til 39.000 kr. om måneden. Mænd tjener i gennemsnit
261 kr., mens kvinder tjener 222 kr. i timen. Løngabet er
således på 15 pct.
In english, from google translate:
Employees in the Danish labor earn an average of 243
kr. per hour, equivalent to 39,000 kr. a month. Men earn an average
261 kr., While women earn 222 kr. Per hour. the pay gap is
thus 15 per cent.
39000 kr monthly to USD yearly is 65 520. So if that's the average salary in Denmark, 70 000 USD cannot be low.
Yes, I checked that conversion just before. It is worth noting the krone/Euro (which the krone is pegged to?) Is down on the USD.
I find your numbers more believable, yes.
It's very easy for government agencies to befuddle otherwise number literate people with technicalities so it's not really proof of anything regards Wagonlitz. I've heard my own government has already achieved our 30% reduction target on 2005 emmisions by simply using "gross" for one figure and "net" for the other. Nothing Wagonlitz reported looked like an invented number, just a series of the kinds of convenient ommissions official figures love followed by an out of date currency conversion.
I will say that reporting things monthly is just plain weird though. Euros...
I find your numbers more believable, yes.
It's very easy for government agencies to befuddle otherwise number literate people with technicalities so it's not really proof of anything regards Wagonlitz. I've heard my own government has already achieved our 30% reduction target on 2005 emmisions by simply using "gross" for one figure and "net" for the other. Nothing Wagonlitz reported looked like an invented number, just a series of the kinds of convenient ommissions official figures love followed by an out of date currency conversion.
I will say that reporting things monthly is just plain weird though. Euros...
Let us not forget that Denmark has income taxes well in excess of American levels, and overall I suspect higher living costs though I could be wrong, so the average Dane would probably have quite a bit less then the average American after taxes/essential payments (living standard is a whole other matter. Just talking raw money here).
No more dreary then your typical college dorm, and certainly less dreary than most prison cells in the world. That was my main point. I was also considering the adjoining sex/gaming room in the equation
1 EURO = 7.5 DKK. Has been that way since 1983.
VAT is 25% on everything. On by EU law foreign internet sellers have to charge it too. If I purchase something from your internet store you need to charge me 25% VAT and send it to the Danish tax authorities lest you want to break EU law. Though you being American means that you probably won't get in trouble for breaking the law.
Income taxes are a 37% for earning less than around 80k USD a year and around 56% for people earning over that. It's a bit more complex (though in no means ununderstandable at all; it's actually quite clear and non convoluted). There's also possible deductions of which the personal one (~7k USD) is one everybody gets.
Then there's all the indirect taxes. E.g. 150% tax on purchasing a new car (used to be 180%, but the die hard liberals thought that was too high and had it put down to 150% a year ago).
No idea. Though outside the forced inheritance (the part you by law is forced to pay your descendants) you can do pretty much whatever you want so could well be. But again I don't know.
That wiki page is completely bonkers. It claims that the average gross wage here is 3000 € a month which it most certainly isn't. It's 5200 € a month. I have literally no idea where they got their numbers from.
Also torn the amount I converted to 70k USD is low; though obviously it's in the high end and you could possibly argue that low wage ends at say 60k or 65k USD. It turns out though that the weakening of the Euro is more severe than I realised. The USD is now at 1 USD = 7 DKK according to google, which obviously means that my 70k USD figure isn't good anymore (hence why I prefer giving numbers in DKK or euro). What I called 70k USD would rather be around 50k USD with the current exchange rate.
And Torn back when the exchange rate I used was valid the average wage was nearly 100k USD. Nothing delusional there.
What do you mean? You think I'm trolling? I've talked about Danish wages before and said the same things; in fact you made a joke about it which won the POTM.
I was talking about mean, individual wages. Household income can be seen in the below English link which is in Denmark and is from the databases and hence the most correct numbers you can get. Note that a household/family is any address where at least 1 person over 15 (and eligible to pay tax) lives. Meaning that a flat with 1 person living there is a household; and so is a house with a couple and 4 children.
Yearly household income for couples is 737 580 DKK which is 98344 € and 105 369 USD with the current USD exchange rate. For singles it's 285 948 DKK which is 38126 € which with current exchange rate is 40850 USD.
http://dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/indkomster/familieindkomster
No idea what the median is.
Which adjustments? Are you talking about things like PPP? If so then I don't know. And I'm also questioning how correct it is to give that, since it doesn't change that how much money people actually are paid and while services and goods are more expensive in Denmark than in the US (generally), that doesn't mean that some store will say that my 100 bucks is less worth than your 100 bucks which is what should happen if you go fully through with PPP. Hence why I'm not sure how useful it is. Prices will just be higher in stores mainly catering to Danes than in stores mainly catering to say Americans. Though I'm no economist so I might be completely wrong here.
But as mentioned above the yearly average household income here is 105369 USD for couples (no matter whether they have children or not) and 40850 USD for singles (no matter whether they have children living with them or not). For households with three or more people over 15 and paying tax living there I don't know what it is, though the amount of such households will be negligible.
Firstly jeray is not right in what the average wage is (I'm minimising quotes so answering small ones together with bigger ones). The average wage is 39k a month which is 5200 €. What it is in USD will fluctuate with time, hence why giving the number in € is much better since the DKK is pegged to the Euro (despite being far stronger than the euro; the peg's for obvious economic reasons though from time to time speculants are trying to break it since they'd make a fortune from it, since should the peg break the value of the DKK would skyrocket).
Anyway with the current USD rate it's around 5600 USD a month. Though do note that the 39k number is from a report to parliament back in 2013 and hence the 39k is the 2012 numbers. The average wage will have risen since then, but the 39k should still be good enough as long as we aren't needing precise calculations.
Again no idea what the median is for the monthly wage, for for the hourly rate it's 218 DKK (29 € 31 USD), whereas the mean is 243 DKK (32 € 35 USD). Though note that pretty much everybody have fixed wages (and hence fixed hours) and hence talking hourly rate instead of monthly wage is pretty strange. Though for some reason they didn't give the median monthly wage in the abstract, but only the mean. No idea why.
And Torn's number is rubbish with regard to this discussion---I assume you mean the 308 144 DKK (41085 € 44020 USD) he quoted. Here you have the detailed numbers in English and if you look at the description you'll notice that it covers every single person in Denmark who is over 15 years of age and who's liable to pay tax (and everybody with permanent residence here has to pay tax). So his number is not the average wage, but the average personal income. People on the various security nets are counted too. So are retired people, students, disabled people who can't hold a job, etc. Nothing wrong with the numbers per se (and they can be quite interesting and useful), but they're not what we're discussing. The average wage obviously will be higher since the average won't be dragged down by people who aren't working and hence obviously making less, since benefits (generally) are lower than wages.
http://dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/indkomster/personindkomster
Read the link you posted again. Those 44k USD are the average income of the total population above 15. That is not the same as the average salary; that's quite below the average salary in fact. And the rate I used to get the 70k USD turned out to be really outdated due to the recent fall in euro USD rates. If I give it in € instead then the 30k to 70k obsoletely converted USD would be around 25k to around 50k €.
Google translate translation seems right (can't guarantee that there isn't some terms which are wrongly translated, but in layman terms it's right). And as mentioned the exchange rate I used was horribly obsolete. Perhaps I should just always give numbers in €, but then non Europeans complain---on the other hand giving them in € means I never run into problems like this where the numbers I give used to be correct, but not aren't due to the exchange rate significantly changing. Back when I did the numbers the 39k a month equaled around 96k USD a year.
As mentioned Torn's numbers are the average income for the entire population over 15 years of age and hence much lower than the average wage since people with jobs earn more than people on benefits. There's no technicalities at all there. Torn just aren't talking about the same population group as the rest of us. He's talking about the entire population over 15 whereas we're just talking about employees. And all numbers I reported indeed are true numbers and I can point you to the source of every single one of them. But yes the currency conversion turned out to be horribly out of date.
And there's absolutely no omissions in the numbers I gave. The all the numbers are from Statistics Denmark which is the government agency who has to compile statistics for the government/administration and the public. And they're fully independent and have always been so since they were formed around 1850. Politicians don't mess/obfuscate/omit anything from the data they use. They have direct, unlimited access to the databases. And most of all that data from the databases they then make publicly available. Some of it is summed up on their main site, but if you really want hard data then you can go to their statistics bank site where you have all publicly database information at your disposal and can draw out data in any combination you'd like.
Here you have the statistics bank.
http://www.statistikbanken.dk/statbank5a/SelectTable/Omrade0.asp?SubjectCode=&PLanguage=1
For instance on October 1st 2016 there were 551 New Zealand citizens living in Denmark; the amount of people from NZ on October 1st 2016 was 674 meaning that 123 people from NZ doesn't have NZ citizenship (presumably due to having a Danish one). You can also all kinds of graphs/charts for how their number has changed just like you can get things like age, gender, where they live, etc. You can then also have where they live shown on a nice map. (October 1st 2016 is the most recent they have publicly released data for; the data bases of course have real time data, but unless you're in the central administration you won't be able to see that real time data, but only get data dumps with regular time intervals and the public also don't get access to all data for obvious reasons. For instance if I have a specific address in Denmark I can trivially find out every single loan/mortgage on it, when it was built, when extensions where build, who the owners are, and everything else which is listed for that property. (Some American did a data scrape (authorities called it hacking) of that land registrations data base and put the data on his website a few months back; led to quite a fuss and the Americans (upon request) looking into shutting him down, though he went off the grid before they caught him.))
To prove most of the combined databases are publicly available then anybody try and ask me something and I'll answer as long as the data is publicly available. (Though don't ask about things from the land registration database; I'm not comfortable posting that online.)
Here you for instance have the amount of kiwis (as in people from NZ) in Denmark over time with each tick on the graph covering a year. Vertical axis is the amount; horizontal the year. And since I randomly saw it was a possibility and fought it fun then I also included the number of people from East Germany; it's the graph titled DDR---there were two of those until 2008 when they both had died/left the country/stopped counting as East Germans (I have no idea why they weren't just counted as Germans which the rest apparently was as evidenced by that drop after 1991).
Remember that Danes don't have to worry about things like paying for education, health care, etc. since it's free. Education including everything in university (including a student wage for studying) is completely free; and so is health care. It's all funded through the taxes which is why they are so high. So you need to take that into consideration when you compare the amount of money Danes and Americans have to spend, because while Americans will have a higher one in PPP they also have to set money aside for university, health care, etc.
You think that having a sex room is spectacular? Again it's pretty much just a bed. And the reason it's there is that in daytime the cells aren't closed so if you want some privacy during sex you need to go to a specific room. So I don't see how having the sex room making it grand compared to outside living accommodations. And the gaming room is comparable to a living room. Except the TV isn't that big, the board games are old, and it's probably something like a ps2 which is available (might be ps3 these days; don't know). That's not something I'd call spectacular in any way; anybody with a living room can easily do better.I was also considering the adjoining sex/gaming room in the equation
Also the furnitures in that cell aren't stellar at all; in fact the chair close to the cell door is a type used in schools around the 70s and unless it's a design classic (which I doubt) it isn't really worth anything.
Attachments
No idea. Though outside the forced inheritance (the part you by law is forced to pay your descendants) you can do pretty much whatever you want so could well be. But again I don't know.
That wiki page is completely bonkers. It claims that the average gross wage here is 3000 € a month which it most certainly isn't. It's 5200 € a month. I have literally no idea where they got their numbers from.
Also torn the amount I converted to 70k USD is low; though obviously it's in the high end and you could possibly argue that low wage ends at say 60k or 65k USD. It turns out though that the weakening of the Euro is more severe than I realised. The USD is now at 1 USD = 7 DKK according to google, which obviously means that my 70k USD figure isn't good anymore (hence why I prefer giving numbers in DKK or euro). What I called 70k USD would rather be around 50k USD with the current exchange rate.
And Torn back when the exchange rate I used was valid the average wage was nearly 100k USD. Nothing delusional there.
What do you mean? You think I'm trolling? I've talked about Danish wages before and said the same things; in fact you made a joke about it which won the POTM.
I was talking about mean, individual wages. Household income can be seen in the below English link which is in Denmark and is from the databases and hence the most correct numbers you can get. Note that a household/family is any address where at least 1 person over 15 (and eligible to pay tax) lives. Meaning that a flat with 1 person living there is a household; and so is a house with a couple and 4 children.
Yearly household income for couples is 737 580 DKK which is 98344 € and 105 369 USD with the current USD exchange rate. For singles it's 285 948 DKK which is 38126 € which with current exchange rate is 40850 USD.
http://dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/indkomster/familieindkomster
No idea what the median is.
Which adjustments? Are you talking about things like PPP? If so then I don't know. And I'm also questioning how correct it is to give that, since it doesn't change that how much money people actually are paid and while services and goods are more expensive in Denmark than in the US (generally), that doesn't mean that some store will say that my 100 bucks is less worth than your 100 bucks which is what should happen if you go fully through with PPP. Hence why I'm not sure how useful it is. Prices will just be higher in stores mainly catering to Danes than in stores mainly catering to say Americans. Though I'm no economist so I might be completely wrong here.
But as mentioned above the yearly average household income here is 105369 USD for couples (no matter whether they have children or not) and 40850 USD for singles (no matter whether they have children living with them or not). For households with three or more people over 15 and paying tax living there I don't know what it is, though the amount of such households will be negligible.
Firstly jeray is not right in what the average wage is (I'm minimising quotes so answering small ones together with bigger ones). The average wage is 39k a month which is 5200 €. What it is in USD will fluctuate with time, hence why giving the number in € is much better since the DKK is pegged to the Euro (despite being far stronger than the euro; the peg's for obvious economic reasons though from time to time speculants are trying to break it since they'd make a fortune from it, since should the peg break the value of the DKK would skyrocket).
Anyway with the current USD rate it's around 5600 USD a month. Though do note that the 39k number is from a report to parliament back in 2013 and hence the 39k is the 2012 numbers. The average wage will have risen since then, but the 39k should still be good enough as long as we aren't needing precise calculations.
Again no idea what the median is for the monthly wage, for for the hourly rate it's 218 DKK (29 € 31 USD), whereas the mean is 243 DKK (32 € 35 USD). Though note that pretty much everybody have fixed wages (and hence fixed hours) and hence talking hourly rate instead of monthly wage is pretty strange. Though for some reason they didn't give the median monthly wage in the abstract, but only the mean. No idea why.
And Torn's number is rubbish with regard to this discussion---I assume you mean the 308 144 DKK (41085 € 44020 USD) he quoted. Here you have the detailed numbers in English and if you look at the description you'll notice that it covers every single person in Denmark who is over 15 years of age and who's liable to pay tax (and everybody with permanent residence here has to pay tax). So his number is not the average wage, but the average personal income. People on the various security nets are counted too. So are retired people, students, disabled people who can't hold a job, etc. Nothing wrong with the numbers per se (and they can be quite interesting and useful), but they're not what we're discussing. The average wage obviously will be higher since the average won't be dragged down by people who aren't working and hence obviously making less, since benefits (generally) are lower than wages.
http://dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/indkomster/personindkomster
Read the link you posted again. Those 44k USD are the average income of the total population above 15. That is not the same as the average salary; that's quite below the average salary in fact. And the rate I used to get the 70k USD turned out to be really outdated due to the recent fall in euro USD rates. If I give it in € instead then the 30k to 70k obsoletely converted USD would be around 25k to around 50k €.
Google translate translation seems right (can't guarantee that there isn't some terms which are wrongly translated, but in layman terms it's right). And as mentioned the exchange rate I used was horribly obsolete. Perhaps I should just always give numbers in €, but then non Europeans complain---on the other hand giving them in € means I never run into problems like this where the numbers I give used to be correct, but not aren't due to the exchange rate significantly changing. Back when I did the numbers the 39k a month equaled around 96k USD a year.
As mentioned Torn's numbers are the average income for the entire population over 15 years of age and hence much lower than the average wage since people with jobs earn more than people on benefits. There's no technicalities at all there. Torn just aren't talking about the same population group as the rest of us. He's talking about the entire population over 15 whereas we're just talking about employees. And all numbers I reported indeed are true numbers and I can point you to the source of every single one of them. But yes the currency conversion turned out to be horribly out of date.
And there's absolutely no omissions in the numbers I gave. The all the numbers are from Statistics Denmark which is the government agency who has to compile statistics for the government/administration and the public. And they're fully independent and have always been so since they were formed around 1850. Politicians don't mess/obfuscate/omit anything from the data they use. They have direct, unlimited access to the databases. And most of all that data from the databases they then make publicly available. Some of it is summed up on their main site, but if you really want hard data then you can go to their statistics bank site where you have all publicly database information at your disposal and can draw out data in any combination you'd like.
Here you have the statistics bank.
http://www.statistikbanken.dk/statbank5a/SelectTable/Omrade0.asp?SubjectCode=&PLanguage=1
For instance on October 1st 2016 there were 551 New Zealand citizens living in Denmark; the amount of people from NZ on October 1st 2016 was 674 meaning that 123 people from NZ doesn't have NZ citizenship (presumably due to having a Danish one). You can also all kinds of graphs/charts for how their number has changed just like you can get things like age, gender, where they live, etc. You can then also have where they live shown on a nice map. (October 1st 2016 is the most recent they have publicly released data for; the data bases of course have real time data, but unless you're in the central administration you won't be able to see that real time data, but only get data dumps with regular time intervals and the public also don't get access to all data for obvious reasons. For instance if I have a specific address in Denmark I can trivially find out every single loan/mortgage on it, when it was built, when extensions where build, who the owners are, and everything else which is listed for that property. (Some American did a data scrape (authorities called it hacking) of that land registrations data base and put the data on his website a few months back; led to quite a fuss and the Americans (upon request) looking into shutting him down, though he went off the grid before they caught him.))
To prove most of the combined databases are publicly available then anybody try and ask me something and I'll answer as long as the data is publicly available. (Though don't ask about things from the land registration database; I'm not comfortable posting that online.)
Here you for instance have the amount of kiwis (as in people from NZ) in Denmark over time with each tick on the graph covering a year. Vertical axis is the amount; horizontal the year. And since I randomly saw it was a possibility and fought it fun then I also included the number of people from East Germany; it's the graph titled DDR---there were two of those until 2008 when they both had died/left the country/stopped counting as East Germans (I have no idea why they weren't just counted as Germans which the rest apparently was as evidenced by that drop after 1991).
Remember that Danes don't have to worry about things like paying for education, health care, etc. since it's free. Education including everything in university (including a student wage for studying) is completely free; and so is health care. It's all funded through the taxes which is why they are so high. So you need to take that into consideration when you compare the amount of money Danes and Americans have to spend, because while Americans will have a higher one in PPP they also have to set money aside for university, health care, etc.
You think that having a sex room is spectacular? Again it's pretty much just a bed. And the reason it's there is that in daytime the cells aren't closed so if you want some privacy during sex you need to go to a specific room. So I don't see how having the sex room making it grand compared to outside living accommodations. And the gaming room is comparable to a living room. Except the TV isn't that big, the board games are old, and it's probably something like a ps2 which is available (might be ps3 these days; don't know). That's not something I'd call spectacular in any way; anybody with a living room can easily do better.
Also the furnitures in that cell aren't stellar at all; in fact the chair close to the cell door is a type used in schools around the 70s and unless it's a design classic (which I doubt) it isn't really worth anything.
Here we go, your official government stats comparing apples with apples:
An average income of 308,144 krone or 44,000 USD across both genders (pre-tax). That sounds about right.
I've now dug through the mammoth post to see Wagonlitz has addressed that...
It's crucial to include those people. They need food, shelter and clothing as much as anyone else does. They will be paying for it with pensions or benefits, which are incomes, or by being dependent on another person. Otherwise they'd be dying on the street.
45k USD a year would make more than half of your working age population excited, depending what strings it came with. That makes it a better than average wage, even if actual job wages are typically higher. Because all those people without a job still want (and need) to buy stuff. And so the standard reporting around the world is to include everyone over 15. Apples with apples. It's what's always meant by average income. Your average income is 44k USD, which is still something to be happy with.
It's crucial to include those people. They need food, shelter and clothing as much as anyone else does. They will be paying for it with pensions or benefits, which are incomes, or by being dependent on another person. Otherwise they'd be dying on the street.
45k USD a year would make more than half of your working age population excited, depending what strings it came with. That makes it a better than average wage, even if actual job wages are typically higher. Because all those people without a job still want (and need) to buy stuff. And so the standard reporting around the world is to include everyone over 15. Apples with apples. It's what's always meant by average income. Your average income is 44k USD, which is still something to be happy with.
Maybe Danes simply have more refined tastes?
Yeah, looked at that way, it sounds far less saucy. Anyone with a bed has, ipso facto, a sex room. I suggest that everyone start referring to bedrooms as "sex rooms" to see how friends, neighbors, etc, react. Social experiment.
That's completely true and why the average income is considerably lower than the average wage (for instance people on early retirement only make around 35k USD a year).
Please provide a source for that, because in my experience working people most certainly wouldn't want to make due with that even if it's free. (Unless they're one of the few making around that or less.) Though anybody on benefits of course would be thrilled to get that.
You mean that it's better because it accounts for the entire population? I can see that and also do agree---to some extent. When you're talking about wages then it isn't really useful.
And anyway I was talking about the average wage all along and that is the ~67k USD a year (39k DKK a month) I mentioned earlier.
By the way the average income is expected to steeply rise in coming years. The reason being that women are fully on the work market here and have been since the 60s/70s. Hence what's pulling down the average income mainly is retirees (there aren't that many students, disabled people, teenagers over 15, etc.) and since 1990 it's been mandatory for people in the private sector to save a significant percentage of their wage for pensions each month (were talking around 15% though the exact amount depends on your job) and then there's the work market additional pension which takes 8% from your wage (don't think that's included in the 15%). Pre 1990 people in the private sector didn't really have any pensions and would only get the public pension which is quite low. So the longer you get after 1990 the larger pensions retirees have until you get to when retirees entered the work market post 1990. (Public workers paid part of their salary to pensions way before 1990.) So with the income of retirees going up closer to their income while employed the average income should rise too. (Something like 15 to 20% of the population is retired at the moment so their pensions getting much larger will have a significant impact on the average income.)
What I meant is that due to us being a high wage area you can sell the same thing at a higher price here than you could in e.g. the US. Though obviously there's parts of the US would you could have it be just as expensive or expensiver. It's all about your clientel. If they are well off and willing to pay what you ask for instead of driving far away to get it cheaper, then you can charge a higher price.
It's part of why many people drive from all over the country with large trailers to Germany to stock up on beer, candy, soda, and other things which are cheaper there. Heck at the major roads into Germany border shops lie literally just meters into Germany and are a dime a dozen (which is a saying that doesn't really make sense). Plus you'll be hard pressed to find anybody speaking German in those stores; even the staff speaks Danish by default and all the prises are in DKK and all the text in Danish. Just like they send out Danish language ads all over the country and air them on TV. (That TV ad with topless women parachuting to the sound of ride of the walkyries is an ad from one of those store chains.
And those stores are actually a bit more expensive than actual German stores further into Germany, but they're cheap enough that people just drive to them, cram as much into their car as possible plus sign a paper stating the 400 L (100 gallons) of beer is for personal consumption and not for sale, and then they drive back since now they've been to Germany and stocked up on beer and candy.
(Of course the amount of purchased beer can both be larger and smaller than 400 L; I just mentioned that number to point out that people buy insane amounts and that you can cram quite a lot into a car and if you bring a trailer, which many do, you can haul even more. And coming home with 400 L of beer, while definitely on the very high side, actually isn't unrealistic. It's only 50 casings of beer after all.
They don't have normal shopping carts in those stores, but a special kind of carts which basically are flatbeds.
That's completely true and why the average income is considerably lower than the average wage (for instance people on early retirement only make around 35k USD a year).
Please provide a source for that, because in my experience working people most certainly wouldn't want to make due with that even if it's free. (Unless they're one of the few making around that or less.) Though anybody on benefits of course would be thrilled to get that.
You mean that it's better because it accounts for the entire population? I can see that and also do agree---to some extent. When you're talking about wages then it isn't really useful.
And anyway I was talking about the average wage all along and that is the ~67k USD a year (39k DKK a month) I mentioned earlier.
By the way the average income is expected to steeply rise in coming years. The reason being that women are fully on the work market here and have been since the 60s/70s. Hence what's pulling down the average income mainly is retirees (there aren't that many students, disabled people, teenagers over 15, etc.) and since 1990 it's been mandatory for people in the private sector to save a significant percentage of their wage for pensions each month (were talking around 15% though the exact amount depends on your job) and then there's the work market additional pension which takes 8% from your wage (don't think that's included in the 15%). Pre 1990 people in the private sector didn't really have any pensions and would only get the public pension which is quite low. So the longer you get after 1990 the larger pensions retirees have until you get to when retirees entered the work market post 1990. (Public workers paid part of their salary to pensions way before 1990.) So with the income of retirees going up closer to their income while employed the average income should rise too. (Something like 15 to 20% of the population is retired at the moment so their pensions getting much larger will have a significant impact on the average income.)
What I meant is that due to us being a high wage area you can sell the same thing at a higher price here than you could in e.g. the US. Though obviously there's parts of the US would you could have it be just as expensive or expensiver. It's all about your clientel. If they are well off and willing to pay what you ask for instead of driving far away to get it cheaper, then you can charge a higher price.
It's part of why many people drive from all over the country with large trailers to Germany to stock up on beer, candy, soda, and other things which are cheaper there. Heck at the major roads into Germany border shops lie literally just meters into Germany and are a dime a dozen (which is a saying that doesn't really make sense). Plus you'll be hard pressed to find anybody speaking German in those stores; even the staff speaks Danish by default and all the prises are in DKK and all the text in Danish. Just like they send out Danish language ads all over the country and air them on TV. (That TV ad with topless women parachuting to the sound of ride of the walkyries is an ad from one of those store chains.
And those stores are actually a bit more expensive than actual German stores further into Germany, but they're cheap enough that people just drive to them, cram as much into their car as possible plus sign a paper stating the 400 L (100 gallons) of beer is for personal consumption and not for sale, and then they drive back since now they've been to Germany and stocked up on beer and candy.
(Of course the amount of purchased beer can both be larger and smaller than 400 L; I just mentioned that number to point out that people buy insane amounts and that you can cram quite a lot into a car and if you bring a trailer, which many do, you can haul even more. And coming home with 400 L of beer, while definitely on the very high side, actually isn't unrealistic. It's only 50 casings of beer after all.
They don't have normal shopping carts in those stores, but a special kind of carts which basically are flatbeds.
Have you ever cycled to Germany for cheap chocolate and beer?
No. It's something like 200 km (~125 mi) each way.
Have done the trip in car several times though. You're never in doubt who else have been shopping in Germany, since the cars are riding really low as the half a ton or more of goods is pressing the suspension down. (Funnily enough such cars are also more likely to be pulled over by police to check whether it actually is for personal consumption or you plan to sell it despite having signed that you wouldn't sell it.)
This, especially because the discussion was initially about whether or not 70k USD is a low salary or not. Not including the lowest earning people is just fudging statistics. Fact is that earning 70k USD per year probably puts you in the top 20% of earners in Denmark (just guessing here). Even if it is 30%, it is still not a low salary by any means.
I haven't been following on super closely because it gets dull readin about Denmark's economy, but I think Wagon already said he got the exchange rate wrong and meant more like 50 000USD.
Even 50000 USD is not low. In certain rich countries (Denmark very likely included), it might be average, but not low.