Thailand isn't cheap. It's cheap for me.

A country can feel cheap when you arrive with a British salary. That’s a different thing from it being cheap.

I wrote recently about something my wife told me: in her town in Thailand, around 400 baht can be a normal day’s pay.

Since then I’ve been looking around and wondering how that actually works.

Because Thailand isn’t simply cheap.

You can get a local meal for 30 or 40 baht. But cars aren’t cheap. Consumer goods aren’t necessarily cheap. The shopping centres certainly don’t feel priced for somebody earning 400 baht a day.

And in a lot of places, a car isn’t much of a luxury. Public transport outside the major centres can be limited. Good jobs might mean travelling to Bangkok or another city. Remote working doesn’t seem anything like as widespread as I’ve become used to in the UK.

Then our electricity bill arrived.

About 2,500 baht for the month — with us using the air conditioning a great deal, which I should be honest about.

At 400 baht a day, that’s more than six days’ gross wages.

Where the arithmetic actually goes

The answer, from what I’ve observed around my wife’s family, seems to be that the economics of everyday life are structured differently rather than simply being smaller.

People live with parents. Families share resources. Housing can stay within the family across generations. Food is genuinely cheap if you eat locally rather than in the places designed for people like me.

None of which shows up in a cost-of-living comparison, because none of it is a price. It’s an arrangement.

Which is where it started making me think about Britain differently.

What a 7-Eleven toastie tells you about Thailand

There is another place where I keep seeing the same economics in miniature: 7-Eleven.

It is difficult to spend much time in Thailand without ending up in one. Air conditioning. Drinks. Ready meals. Phone credit. Toiletries. Coffee. And, obviously, the ham-and-cheese toastie that gets shoved into the sandwich press and somehow comes out far better than it has any right to.

But the more time I spend here, the more interesting 7-Eleven becomes to me.

Thailand’s 7-Eleven network is operated by CP All, part of the business empire associated with the Chearavanont family. CP traces its beginnings to a small seed shop established in Bangkok in 1921 by immigrant brothers from China. CP All was established decades later and opened Thailand’s first 7-Eleven in 1989. The network has since grown to more than 15,000 stores.

That is an extraordinary story of immigration, entrepreneurship, scale and corporate power in its own right.

But walk into one of those stores and you can see the other side of Thailand’s economy too.

Things have to be affordable.

A toastie, rice meal or bottle of water isn’t priced for a British visitor thinking Thailand is cheap. It has to work for a mass domestic market where incomes can be dramatically lower than mine.

That makes the success of 7-Eleven more ambiguous than simply saying a giant corporation dominates Thai convenience retail.

Scale genuinely creates value. An enormous distribution system can make prepared food, basic goods and services cheap and available almost everywhere. That matters particularly when you don’t have much money.

But the same prices look different when you put them beside local wages. The convenience I experience as remarkably cheap exists inside an economy where everyday purchasing power can be constrained enough that those prices need to stay low.

So I don’t think the interesting question is whether 7-Eleven is good or bad.

It is whether its extraordinary success both alleviates some of the effects of Thailand’s economic disparity and is partly shaped by the same economic structure.

The country contains 30-baht meals, enormous luxury shopping centres, expensive cars, low daily wages and one of Asia’s great corporate empires at the same time.

And somehow you can see a surprising amount of that while waiting three minutes for someone to toast a sandwich.

What a British salary is actually buying

We earn vastly more. We’ve also constructed a way of life in which individuals are expected to buy an enormous amount of independence.

Housing, separately. Childcare, bought in. Transport, individually owned. Food, mostly purchased rather than produced. Care for elderly parents, increasingly outsourced. Entertainment, subscribed to.

Almost every one of those is something the arrangement I’m describing handles without a transaction.

I don’t want to romanticise that. Living with your parents into your thirties is not costless because the cost isn’t monetary — it constrains who you can be, where you can work, and how much you can disagree with the people you depend on. A shared household is a support system and also an obligation system, and the second part is invisible to a visitor admiring the first.

But it does suggest that “cost of living” isn’t quite the right measure.

There’s also the cost of participating in the society around you. What you have to buy in order to live an ordinary life where you are. In Britain that figure is enormous and largely invisible, because we treat it as simply what things cost.

And it has got harder, not easier

The arrangement I’ve described sounds stable. It isn’t, particularly.

Covid did real damage that hasn’t been undone. Businesses around here are visibly struggling — the mookata places, the small Thai barbecue restaurants that are a normal night out rather than a treat, are a fair indicator of whether people locally have spare money. Several have closed. Others look quieter than they should.

An economy where a lot of household resilience comes from family arrangements rather than income is not obviously more fragile than ours. But when the income part fails, the arrangement has to absorb more, and there is a limit to how much absorbing it can do.

My wife’s observation is the one that stuck with me though, and it isn’t about money at all.

Social media has changed what inequality feels like.

Not the distribution — the visibility. When the reference point was the people in your town, an ordinary life looked like an ordinary life. When the reference point is a feed, it is measured against people whose circumstances have nothing to do with yours, continuously, on a device that costs a week’s wages and that everybody has.

That is the cost of participation argument again, arriving from a direction I hadn’t expected. The bar for what an ordinary life looks like isn’t set locally any more. It gets imported.

I’m wary of overstating this, because “social media makes people unhappy” is one of the laziest available observations and I don’t have anything beyond one person’s account of her own country. But the specific version — that the comparison set changed rather than the gap — is sharper than the general complaint, and it explains something the economics on its own doesn’t.

The bit I keep coming back to

A country can feel incredibly cheap when you’re arriving with a British salary.

That is a completely different thing from it being cheap when you’re earning a local one.

Those two sentences describe the same prices and almost nothing else in common. The first is a statement about exchange rates. The second is a statement about whether the arithmetic of an ordinary life works.

I notice that most of what gets written about cheap countries — the cost-of-living rankings, the relocation guides, the digital nomad arithmetic — is written entirely from the first position while sounding like the second.

What I actually know

Very little, and I want to be clear about the size of it.

This is one town, one family, and a person visiting rather than living. The observation about social media is my wife’s, not mine, and I’ve reported it rather than tested it. 400 baht a day is what my wife described about the place she is from — testimony, not a statistic, and I haven’t tried to dress it up as one. Wages vary enormously by region and sector, and somebody in Bangkok would probably read this and find it quaint.

I also have the least reliable vantage point available: comfortable, temporary, and paying for things in a currency that makes everything look manageable. The version of this written by somebody who has to make 400 baht work would be a different piece, and a better one.

What I’m confident about is narrower. The number that matters isn’t the price of a meal. It’s the relationship between what you earn and what your life requires you to buy — and that relationship is arranged differently in different places, in ways a currency converter can’t see.

Spending time here isn’t only teaching me things about Thailand.

It’s making some of my assumptions about Britain look stranger too.