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Agatha Christie's quote is well-known but the exact same situation still holds today in many countries. Here in Viet Nam it is extremely common for middle incom

Agatha Christie's quote is well-known but the exact same situation still holds today in many countries. Here in Viet Nam it is extremely common for middle income families to have a maid or nanny (or both) but not a car. The cars themselves are quite expensive. A Honda Civic is $33,000 by itself whereas a nanny (6-days a week, 10 hours a day) is $400-500/month and a maid who works 9 hours a week, i.e. 3 days a week, 3 hours each time) is $90-100/month. So a single car not very expensive car costs the same as 5 years of a full-time nanny and part-time maid. And that's without figuring in all the extra costs of a car, especially parking. There's not really free parking most places here. So you'll be paying for parking literally everywhere you go. Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. And the space for a garage isn't cheap either. If you're a middle income family you're probably living in one of the capital cities and most people would probably be shocked at how expensive land is in the capital cities nowadays. [1]: https://www.honda.com.vn/o-to/san-pham/honda-civic/index.html https://www.honda.com.vn/o-to/san-pham/honda-civic/index.htm...

jerry1979 5y ago
Plus, I imagine if you can find a maid at that price, you can certainly find a driver.
- beerandt 5y ago
  Depends on training, licensing, and liability costs. Which vary wildly between countries.
- paxys 5y ago
  You'll still need to give them a car to drive.
  - freddie_mercury 5y ago
    Exactly. Everyone I know here with a driver owns the car themselves and hires the driver separately. I don't know driver salaries since I don't have one but I'm guessing they are similar to nanny salaries since they are usually full-time 8am-8pm, 6-days a week kind of jobs. The only people without their own car tend to be foreign executives who are only going to be here on a 2-3 year contract.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Driver salaries would likely have been much higher because the position wouldn't also cover room & board. Also the gender differences in pay would influence things as well. Last is that household cleaning etc. would have been considered lower skilled labor. This document indicates that somewhere around $20-$30 per week may have been the wage, around page 128. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0286_1921.pdf https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bl...
csours 5y ago
Is there one single most common way of getting around where you are or is it a mix? I assume a lot of motorbikes. What about e-bikes?
- freddie_mercury 5y ago
  Overwhelmingly combustion-engine motorbikes. Something like 7.5-8 million of them on the roads of Ho Chi Minh City. There are e-bikes around but they aren't very common, at least in the south. Like, I see a few every day so they're not super rare. But...I see one or two a day compared to the thousands of regular ones. There's also a bit of toxic masculinity around them; I'd say 99% of the people riding them are women. Most often high school or university age. They are hampered by concerns about theft (it is relatively easy to steal the battery), range, and charging. A newish brand tried to offer a premium e-bike[1] a few years back and you see them around but not very often. Interestingly, I was in Hue on holiday a few years ago -- a city in the north -- and, at least in the city center where we were, it felt like it was 30% electric bikes. I don't know if there was a local government policy encouraging them or what. Honestly, it was pretty amazing. You never realise how much noise combustion engines make until you've seen a huge fraction of them taken off the road like that. It was very pleasant. [1]: http://xemayvinfast.vn/xe/vinfast-klara/ http://xemayvinfast.vn/xe/vinfast-klara/
  - stackdatcamp 5y ago
    I live in Hanoi. One of the best purchases I made last year was noise cancelling headphones. It's the productivity boost I never knew I needed so much.
  - fouc 5y ago
    > There's also a bit of toxic masculinity around them; I'd say 99% of the people riding them are women. Most often high school or university age. I disagree, I saw a great many male students driving electric bikes back in 2020 (Hanoi, Da Nang, HCMC). I would say of the particular model of e-bike that I tended to notice (the often black or black&red ones with large footrest area), easily 20%-50% drivers were male. I think the reason it isn't more common yet is probably because of range. http://image.vietnamnews.vn//uploadvnnews/Article/2016/7/4/03-Xedapdien31152156PM.jpg http://image.vietnamnews.vn//uploadvnnews/Article/2016/7/4/0... https://xedapdien.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/xe_may_dien.jpg https://xedapdien.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/xe_may_dien...
joe_the_user 5y ago
I had a fellow American friend who lived in Bali for a year in the mid-70s. When he arrived, he shopped for his own food and cooked it. But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class, he could hire a housekeeper and have them buy and cook his food for the same price as buying his own found. And people expect him to do this.
- slim 5y ago
  it's a thing in left litterature. this role is called "comprador" and it has very negative connotation (for obvious reasons if you think about it from the native perspective)
- telesilla 5y ago
  >people expect him to do this. Right, it's part of how society works. In some places, having a housekeeper is a critical part of the economy and its incredibly impolite not to have one, if you are part of the expat class.
  - mcorning 5y ago
    I'm surprised to hear that it is impolite to not have a housekeeper if you are an expat. To which places are you referring?
    - grandinj 5y ago
      That's a fairly common attitude in poorer countries - there is an expectation that if you are wealthy, you have (at the very least) an obligation to provide employment.
      - jiggunjer 5y ago
        But expat doesn't automatically mean wealthy.
        medion 5y ago
newyankee 5y ago
Same in India. For a lot of people Car is more of a status symbol and in some crowded cities it is much easier to take a 2 wheeler.
- bluGill 5y ago
  India is building a lot of public transit now. I will be interested in seeing how that changes the culture of such cities. This is long term - transit needs to go close to where you are and where you want to be before people will use it, so a large part of the change depends on if/when they build more lines after the current ones open.
refurb 5y ago
It pretty much comes down to labor costs. I spent some time in VN and anything that requires unskilled labor is incredibly inexpensive. Delivery? Sure, someone will bring it across the city, in the next hour for 35,000 Dong ($1.50USD). Want to buy shoes? Msg a store, they’ll send pictures, choose a few and they send a store employee over to your house to try them on. That is changing though. Covid completely messed up the labor market and rather than get locked down, losing your job and still having to pay rent and food, people just went back to the countryside with family and are staying there for now. As a result labor shortages, even nannies, and wages are going up. I think it’s a good thing, it’s the bottom moving up. I expect you’ll see a similar transition as the UK eventually. Maids and nannies becomes something exclusive to the rich. Unless of course they continue to import them from lower income countries - a la Singapore.
andi999 5y ago
Also the extra usefulness of a car is much lower. In SEA you can transport the whole family on a scooter.
- xuki 5y ago
  Hahaha this was my family of 4, 20 years ago. I still remember it vividly for some reason, thanks for the reminder.
- tuankiet65 5y ago
  When it starts raining though, you'd wish you're taking shelter in a car instead of riding scooters while wearing a raincoat.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  You can transport your family on a motorcycle or scooter in the US too. You'll just be on a first name basis with all the cops everywhere you go regularly because even if the cops themselves dgaf there will be no shortage of people calling them on you.
  - andi999 5y ago
    So not a realistic option, isnt it?
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      That's my point. We're more or less forced to spend resources doing things to a higher standard.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      I wonder about speeds. The only places I've seen a lot of people on motorcycles is in heavy traffic where the speed is only slightly faster than you could ride on a bicycle. In the US most traffic is at higher speeds on residential roads, and you are expected to jump over to the freeway with very high speeds to get around. As such the practice is much more dangerous if you drive like you are in the US (not that it is ever safe)
anovikov 5y ago
It's not a surprise - today's Vietnam per capita GDP is same as U.S. (and probably UK since the countries were close in their economic development) in 1919 (13-14% of today's U.S. level). Interestingly, in societies with several "tiers" made up of people of different origin (many of them full-on citizens anyway, it's not about legal rights but about race/class which is perceived to be same thing), it can work even on a much higher level of economic development. Cyprus where i live is at around 60% of U.S. level, and average family can have a full-time maid, as long as she's from Philippines. I was surprised to know that many of these Philippines maids have better immigration status than myself and this is certainly not because they are "forced to work for pennies or risk being kicking out of the country". It's just a perception of how much a Philippine maid is worth.
- pkaye 5y ago
  I think its common in Singapore too from what I've seen.
TomK32 5y ago
Here in Austria we still have building codes from the Nazis that dictate a parking space for every new unit built. This is absolutely ridiculous in cities where car ownership is going down but underground parking is built. A sad result is that many of those expensive underground parking spaces are empty because house owners are not forced to rent out units and parking spaces separately while at the same time the overground parking (for 50 Euros a year in Linz' Blue parking zone) are overcrowded.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Sounds like they are just leaving money on the table ? (So there must be other reasons ?)
  - bluGill 5y ago
    They probably are leaving money on the table, but the hassle of renting out your unused parking spot isn't really worth the money you could make. There is also the convenience on when a guest arrives with a car you can give them your parking spot (this would typically happen only a few times a year) The landlord could make a lot of money by collecting all the unused parking spots, but that is probably either illegal (those are for the residents and can't be separated from the units) or technically legal but they fear it would be made illegal if they tried. The real money left on the table is secondary effects: residents pay for parking they don't need/use; and that parking takes up space that could be used for something else thus making the area more dense and public transit because of the additional people in dense area can afford to be more useful.
yreg 5y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to quote the price of a new car (which is in tens of thousands) when determining whether someone can afford a car. I sold my last car for €500 and it wasn't in the worst shape.
- kragen 5y ago
  Where mechanics' labor is cheap, used cars cost nearly as much as new cars. This surprised me too when I first observed it.
- echlipse 5y ago
  Most middle class families who can afford a car in developing nations rarely buy used cars/motorcycles. Giving the scenario in India. Vehicles are treated as a luxury here which are bought much later in a person’s life. Most families don’t even buy a car in India. It’s takes a lot of money to maintain it and it is very costly to drive one. The vehicle which you’ll find in every household here is a motorcycle and that too in mostly between 150cc-200cc engine range. The reason for that too is because lesser the cc, cheaper the bike, more the mileage.
radu_floricica 5y ago
I'm in a moderately ok country, and I still see buying a new car as a luxury. It's something you do much later in life/career, when you can't be bother to take care of the extra management a used car comes with. And definitely not for everybody - there's quite a few people I know that are middle age with kids and don't even think about a new car. They just have chose other tradeoffs
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I mean, given the depreciation on most new cars, it doesn't make sense to buy a new car in a lot of cases. But it depends on various factors like how much do you drive, does your employer compensate you for driving, how much maintenance does a used vs a new car need, etc. Note that this is a very eurocentric viewpoint coming from someone who only has a car for shopping and family visits. In my previous job I had a lease car from my employer, that made a bit more sense then given how much I had to drive.
Grustaf 5y ago
> Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. I don't know if this is meant to be serious, but you could just park your car outdoors, like city dwellers do?
- literallycancer 5y ago
  There's not enough space for everyone to do this. It's also often not free, you have to pay the city for using up the street space etc. New housing in Europe is planned with underground garage space exactly for this reason. SEA cities are even more densely populated.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    But aren't we talking about single family houses here, with a garden? If you have room for a garage in your garden, surely you have room for a car without a garage?
    - literallycancer 5y ago
      The other poster mentioned Vietnam, I would expect cities there to be quite dense with townhouses or a tiny "garden" that's more like the smallest gap between houses that you can get away with while not breaking the construction code.
bothandeach 5y ago
Hey, I'm with you. In Vancouver, BC, Canada
pyuser583 5y ago
I heard in Hong Kong it was cheaper to have a chauffeur drive the car around the city than to buy a parking space. So instead of parking the car, it would just be driven around the block again and again.

jerry1979 5y ago

Plus, I imagine if you can find a maid at that price, you can certainly find a driver.

beerandt 5y ago
Depends on training, licensing, and liability costs. Which vary wildly between countries.
paxys 5y ago
You'll still need to give them a car to drive.
- freddie_mercury 5y ago
  Exactly. Everyone I know here with a driver owns the car themselves and hires the driver separately. I don't know driver salaries since I don't have one but I'm guessing they are similar to nanny salaries since they are usually full-time 8am-8pm, 6-days a week kind of jobs. The only people without their own car tend to be foreign executives who are only going to be here on a 2-3 year contract.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Driver salaries would likely have been much higher because the position wouldn't also cover room & board. Also the gender differences in pay would influence things as well. Last is that household cleaning etc. would have been considered lower skilled labor. This document indicates that somewhere around $20-$30 per week may have been the wage, around page 128. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bls_0286_1921.pdf https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/files/docs/publications/bls/bl...

csours 5y ago

Is there one single most common way of getting around where you are or is it a mix? I assume a lot of motorbikes. What about e-bikes?

freddie_mercury 5y ago
Overwhelmingly combustion-engine motorbikes. Something like 7.5-8 million of them on the roads of Ho Chi Minh City. There are e-bikes around but they aren't very common, at least in the south. Like, I see a few every day so they're not super rare. But...I see one or two a day compared to the thousands of regular ones. There's also a bit of toxic masculinity around them; I'd say 99% of the people riding them are women. Most often high school or university age. They are hampered by concerns about theft (it is relatively easy to steal the battery), range, and charging. A newish brand tried to offer a premium e-bike[1] a few years back and you see them around but not very often. Interestingly, I was in Hue on holiday a few years ago -- a city in the north -- and, at least in the city center where we were, it felt like it was 30% electric bikes. I don't know if there was a local government policy encouraging them or what. Honestly, it was pretty amazing. You never realise how much noise combustion engines make until you've seen a huge fraction of them taken off the road like that. It was very pleasant. [1]: http://xemayvinfast.vn/xe/vinfast-klara/ http://xemayvinfast.vn/xe/vinfast-klara/
- stackdatcamp 5y ago
  I live in Hanoi. One of the best purchases I made last year was noise cancelling headphones. It's the productivity boost I never knew I needed so much.
- fouc 5y ago
  > There's also a bit of toxic masculinity around them; I'd say 99% of the people riding them are women. Most often high school or university age. I disagree, I saw a great many male students driving electric bikes back in 2020 (Hanoi, Da Nang, HCMC). I would say of the particular model of e-bike that I tended to notice (the often black or black&red ones with large footrest area), easily 20%-50% drivers were male. I think the reason it isn't more common yet is probably because of range. http://image.vietnamnews.vn//uploadvnnews/Article/2016/7/4/03-Xedapdien31152156PM.jpg http://image.vietnamnews.vn//uploadvnnews/Article/2016/7/4/0... https://xedapdien.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/xe_may_dien.jpg https://xedapdien.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/xe_may_dien...

joe_the_user 5y ago

I had a fellow American friend who lived in Bali for a year in the mid-70s. When he arrived, he shopped for his own food and cooked it. But he found that, since the merchants charged people by their social class, he could hire a housekeeper and have them buy and cook his food for the same price as buying his own found. And people expect him to do this.

slim 5y ago
it's a thing in left litterature. this role is called "comprador" and it has very negative connotation (for obvious reasons if you think about it from the native perspective)
telesilla 5y ago
>people expect him to do this. Right, it's part of how society works. In some places, having a housekeeper is a critical part of the economy and its incredibly impolite not to have one, if you are part of the expat class.
- mcorning 5y ago
  I'm surprised to hear that it is impolite to not have a housekeeper if you are an expat. To which places are you referring?
  - grandinj 5y ago
    That's a fairly common attitude in poorer countries - there is an expectation that if you are wealthy, you have (at the very least) an obligation to provide employment.
    - jiggunjer 5y ago
      But expat doesn't automatically mean wealthy.
      - medion 5y ago

newyankee 5y ago

Same in India. For a lot of people Car is more of a status symbol and in some crowded cities it is much easier to take a 2 wheeler.

bluGill 5y ago
India is building a lot of public transit now. I will be interested in seeing how that changes the culture of such cities. This is long term - transit needs to go close to where you are and where you want to be before people will use it, so a large part of the change depends on if/when they build more lines after the current ones open.

refurb 5y ago

It pretty much comes down to labor costs. I spent some time in VN and anything that requires unskilled labor is incredibly inexpensive. Delivery? Sure, someone will bring it across the city, in the next hour for 35,000 Dong ($1.50USD). Want to buy shoes? Msg a store, they’ll send pictures, choose a few and they send a store employee over to your house to try them on. That is changing though. Covid completely messed up the labor market and rather than get locked down, losing your job and still having to pay rent and food, people just went back to the countryside with family and are staying there for now. As a result labor shortages, even nannies, and wages are going up. I think it’s a good thing, it’s the bottom moving up. I expect you’ll see a similar transition as the UK eventually. Maids and nannies becomes something exclusive to the rich. Unless of course they continue to import them from lower income countries - a la Singapore.

andi999 5y ago

Also the extra usefulness of a car is much lower. In SEA you can transport the whole family on a scooter.

xuki 5y ago
Hahaha this was my family of 4, 20 years ago. I still remember it vividly for some reason, thanks for the reminder.
tuankiet65 5y ago
When it starts raining though, you'd wish you're taking shelter in a car instead of riding scooters while wearing a raincoat.
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
You can transport your family on a motorcycle or scooter in the US too. You'll just be on a first name basis with all the cops everywhere you go regularly because even if the cops themselves dgaf there will be no shortage of people calling them on you.
- andi999 5y ago
  So not a realistic option, isnt it?
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    That's my point. We're more or less forced to spend resources doing things to a higher standard.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    I wonder about speeds. The only places I've seen a lot of people on motorcycles is in heavy traffic where the speed is only slightly faster than you could ride on a bicycle. In the US most traffic is at higher speeds on residential roads, and you are expected to jump over to the freeway with very high speeds to get around. As such the practice is much more dangerous if you drive like you are in the US (not that it is ever safe)

anovikov 5y ago

It's not a surprise - today's Vietnam per capita GDP is same as U.S. (and probably UK since the countries were close in their economic development) in 1919 (13-14% of today's U.S. level). Interestingly, in societies with several "tiers" made up of people of different origin (many of them full-on citizens anyway, it's not about legal rights but about race/class which is perceived to be same thing), it can work even on a much higher level of economic development. Cyprus where i live is at around 60% of U.S. level, and average family can have a full-time maid, as long as she's from Philippines. I was surprised to know that many of these Philippines maids have better immigration status than myself and this is certainly not because they are "forced to work for pennies or risk being kicking out of the country". It's just a perception of how much a Philippine maid is worth.

pkaye 5y ago
I think its common in Singapore too from what I've seen.

TomK32 5y ago

Here in Austria we still have building codes from the Nazis that dictate a parking space for every new unit built. This is absolutely ridiculous in cities where car ownership is going down but underground parking is built. A sad result is that many of those expensive underground parking spaces are empty because house owners are not forced to rent out units and parking spaces separately while at the same time the overground parking (for 50 Euros a year in Linz' Blue parking zone) are overcrowded.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Sounds like they are just leaving money on the table ? (So there must be other reasons ?)
- bluGill 5y ago
  They probably are leaving money on the table, but the hassle of renting out your unused parking spot isn't really worth the money you could make. There is also the convenience on when a guest arrives with a car you can give them your parking spot (this would typically happen only a few times a year) The landlord could make a lot of money by collecting all the unused parking spots, but that is probably either illegal (those are for the residents and can't be separated from the units) or technically legal but they fear it would be made illegal if they tried. The real money left on the table is secondary effects: residents pay for parking they don't need/use; and that parking takes up space that could be used for something else thus making the area more dense and public transit because of the additional people in dense area can afford to be more useful.

yreg 5y ago

I don't think it's reasonable to quote the price of a new car (which is in tens of thousands) when determining whether someone can afford a car. I sold my last car for €500 and it wasn't in the worst shape.

kragen 5y ago
Where mechanics' labor is cheap, used cars cost nearly as much as new cars. This surprised me too when I first observed it.
echlipse 5y ago
Most middle class families who can afford a car in developing nations rarely buy used cars/motorcycles. Giving the scenario in India. Vehicles are treated as a luxury here which are bought much later in a person’s life. Most families don’t even buy a car in India. It’s takes a lot of money to maintain it and it is very costly to drive one. The vehicle which you’ll find in every household here is a motorcycle and that too in mostly between 150cc-200cc engine range. The reason for that too is because lesser the cc, cheaper the bike, more the mileage.

radu_floricica 5y ago

I'm in a moderately ok country, and I still see buying a new car as a luxury. It's something you do much later in life/career, when you can't be bother to take care of the extra management a used car comes with. And definitely not for everybody - there's quite a few people I know that are middle age with kids and don't even think about a new car. They just have chose other tradeoffs

Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I mean, given the depreciation on most new cars, it doesn't make sense to buy a new car in a lot of cases. But it depends on various factors like how much do you drive, does your employer compensate you for driving, how much maintenance does a used vs a new car need, etc. Note that this is a very eurocentric viewpoint coming from someone who only has a car for shopping and family visits. In my previous job I had a lease car from my employer, that made a bit more sense then given how much I had to drive.

Grustaf 5y ago

> Even worse, most houses (unless they are luxury houses >$500,000 built in the last 5ish years) aren't built with a garage for a car, so you're looking at buying land, smashing down the existing structure, and then rebuilding something with a garage. I don't know if this is meant to be serious, but you could just park your car outdoors, like city dwellers do?

literallycancer 5y ago
There's not enough space for everyone to do this. It's also often not free, you have to pay the city for using up the street space etc. New housing in Europe is planned with underground garage space exactly for this reason. SEA cities are even more densely populated.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  But aren't we talking about single family houses here, with a garden? If you have room for a garage in your garden, surely you have room for a car without a garage?
  - literallycancer 5y ago
    The other poster mentioned Vietnam, I would expect cities there to be quite dense with townhouses or a tiny "garden" that's more like the smallest gap between houses that you can get away with while not breaking the construction code.

bothandeach 5y ago

Hey, I'm with you. In Vancouver, BC, Canada

pyuser583 5y ago

I heard in Hong Kong it was cheaper to have a chauffeur drive the car around the city than to buy a parking space. So instead of parking the car, it would just be driven around the block again and again.