European Salaries Not Keeping Up With Price Increases

For some time I've been having Euro envy.There are those reports of Europeans taking advantage of the falling dollar and hopping over here for vacations and shopping sprees.

A few months ago, when the prices of a hotel rooms reached astronomical amounts in New York, taxi drivers blamed the European.

Envy is never a good emotion and as it turns out, life on the other side of the Atlantic is having its economic challenges as well. The New York Times has a report on Europe's middle class == a group that is definitely not hopping over here for shopping sprees. As The NYT reports, they're having a hard time finding enough money to buy a baguette.

When their local bakery in this town south of Paris raised the price of a baguette for the third time in six months, Anne-Laure Renard and Guy Talpot bought a bread maker. When gasoline became their biggest single expense, they sold one of their two cars.

Their combined annual income of 40,000 euros, about $62,500, lands Ms. Renard, a teacher, and Mr. Talpot, a postal worker, smack in the middle of France’s middle class. And over the last year, prices in France have risen four times as fast as their salaries.
[...]
“In France, when you can’t afford a baguette anymore, you know you’re in trouble,” Ms. Renard said one recent evening in her kitchen, as her partner measured powdered milk for their 13-month-old son, Vincent. “The French Revolution started with bread riots.”

It's not just in France-- all over Europe workers are feeling their middle class lifestyle disappear because wages have not kept up with inflation --- prices have risen 25% since 2000 and as one person said if your salary doesn't keep up with inflation you begin to feel poor.

Comments

[Nan Patience]

If people don't wake up, we're all going to find ourselves with absolutely nothing and with no power short of a bloodbath to change things...

[Elana]

Nan, I totally agree with you -- this story is very sobering. And as I read the news that this time next year gas could cost $7.00 a gallon I try to imagine what impact that will have on our society and it completely takes my breath away.

[Nan Patience]

If there is to be a bloodbath, I'd like to stand near the French contingent. Those people really know how to revolt. They guillotine while they sing.

[Murray Abramovitch]

With escalating prices and high unemployment, the French have serious structural issues to resolve. At least no one of importance has, as yet, suggested its middle class replace their beloved baguettes with a chocolate marquise covered by a drizzle of raspberry sauce. Thing didn’t turn out too well the last time someone (allegedly) made a similar suggestion.