CITIES
Jo’burg: it gets even cheaper!
Barbara Ludman
10 July 2002
Is Woolworths a “low price clothing shop”? Is Thrupps a “convenience store”? Will a pizza in Jo’burg set you back R70? What about school fees – do you really have to pay anywhere from R10 800 to R20 580 annually to send your child to a decent kindergarten?
There’s nothing wrong with the information fed by researchers to Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which in July 2002 designated Johannesburg as the world’s cheapest out of 70 major cities worldwide. The prices quoted for rental property, hotel rooms, transport, groceries and medical care are fairly accurate.
There’s just one problem: the researchers have expensive tastes.
A “pizza meal for two persons”, for example, is listed at R140 to R160. You can, if you try, find a R70 pizza: at Cornutti in Illovo, where R70 will buy you a pizza of buffalo mozzarella, anchovies, tomato and
basil – but that, they will hastily explain, is because buffalo mozzarella is imported.
For R52,95 you’ll get a tre colori – smoked salmon, sour cream, caviar and spring onions – similar to the R44,50 smoked salmon, sour cream and caviar pizzas served at Café Flo in Greenside, which arguably makes the best pizzas in town.
Looking for a good school? Researchers went to five: the American School in Bryanston, which quotes only in dollars; St John’s College in Houghton; Ecole Francaise Jules Verne in Morningside, the Deutsche Schule in Auckland Park, and the Japanese School of Johannesburg in Linden.
The survey is designed to help multinationals determine allowances for their expatriate staff. Presumably the technocrats sent halfway round the world by their companies to run multi-million-rand businesses will look for a school where the young ones can continue the brand of schooling they’re used to.
But do these expatriate executives have to eat imported camembert
(R39.96 to R55.19), when the local variety is among the best in the world?
Will expatriate women really pay anywhere from R1 300 to R5 500 for a two-piece suit – or up to R2 195 for a cotton blouse? Will the men shell out up to R7 000 for a classic business suit and R2 200 for a pair of shoes?
Must they buy R600 tickets to see international artists? And where are they going to films, that they can pay up to R70 for two tickets?
The answer is in the list of businesses the researchers consulted. They hardly ventured south of Rosebank, while the west was barely touched on. They seem to have spent quite a lot of time, however, in Sandton – where a man will pay up to R125 for a shampoo and haircut and a woman nearly twice as much.
This could well be explained by the likelihood that foreign executives will also spend much of their time in Sandton, but they’re likely to pay quite a lot for the privilege.
To rent a three-bedroom house, unfurnished, in what the
survey calls the “best areas” - “northern suburbs, Houghton, Rosebank and Sandton” - will cost an estimated R33 000 a month. They survey does not quote south of Norwood – although Emmarentia comes in for a mention, but only as a “good area”, or the least of three categories.
Do the personal preferences of researchers influence surveys such as these? Consider the Economist cities survey, one of the best, offering helpful advice to businesspeople and tourists in 17 big cities including Johannesburg, along with London, New York and Paris.
The Economist’s foot-soldier shows a leaning towards Melville – not mentioned at all in the Mercer survey – Sandton, and points north. It recommends the Market Theatre and the Agfa Theatre on the Square, but entirely ignores the Civic Theatre.
The Economist survey gives the inner city very short shrift: “Hillbrow is best avoided at all times; downtown is not lovely after dark
...”, and: “If you rent a car, be sure to carry a mobile telephone, in case you break down somewhere dodgy.”
On the other hand, it does point out that “South African wine is cheap and excellent. Buy as much as your home country will let you import.”
Source: City of Johannesburg web site
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