Why are English newspapers so expensive in Spain?
Friday, March 15, 2013 @ 9:20 AM
One of the downsides of life in Spain is that it's so expensive to buy a newspaper in your own language. That was understandable back in the days of planes with outside toilets, when the newspapers had to be flown in, but these days, it's all done online. The papers are printed in Spain, but all the editorial work is done in the country of origin, so why is it so expensive?
A Daily Mail in the UK is 55p, but over here, it's 2.20 Euro, and to add insult to injury, you don't get any of the free supplements or free gifts. A significant portion of my DVD and CD collection came via the Daily Mail, but these days, we only get them when we're back in the UK.
When we first arrived here, we used to buy a paper every day, even though we winced at the price. I can buy a bottle of LIDL vodka for the price of two newspapers, for heaven's sake!
A while back one of our friends worked out that, if you buy a paper every day - including Saturdays and Sundays when they're even more expensive - it comes out at in excess of 800 Euro a year! Putting that into perspective, that would pay our Aguagest bill and our community fees, and still leave enough over for a slap up meal on our anniversary.
These days, we peruse the British press online to keep up with the news and our favourite columnists. Occasionally, if there's something really big happening in the UK, we'll buy a paper and pass it around our friends after we've read it. And whenever somebody's coming over from the UK, we ask them to bring a couple of papers. I haven't quite got as far as asking them to fix their flights for Saturdays and Sundays so we can get the supplements as well, but I'm seriously considering it!
