The Global Economy

Welcome to the global economy.

In Arizona many products that I buy have packaging written in English, Spanish, and French so the manufacturer can sell in Mexico, U.S.A., and Canada, including Quebec. Because three languages take up more space than one, there is now very little information written on the package compared with before when only English was listed.

Consider now Bulgaria.

Sometimes at the magazine (store) I buy a croissant with a cream filling for a snack. My regular brand costs 0.55 leva and is made in Greece less than 200 miles away. Today when I bought my snack, the price was 0.65 leva. I was surprised until I noticed that this was a different brand with a larger package. Well, I thought, a bigger package means a bigger croissant which justifies the larger price. But when I opened the package the croissant was the same size as before. Why the larger package?

In Europe, just as in the United States, there are requirements that packaged food products must list their ingredients. Also the name and address of the manufacturer or distributor is usually listed. But here in Eastern Europe there are many small countries, some not larger than a single state in America, and most have their own language. So, a company that sells its product in several countries has to give the same information in several languages.

On my little six-inch long croissant, the package gives all the required ingredient information in 14 languages, each requiring about 15 lines of text. This package then is written in Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, German, Bosnian, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovene, Slovak, Greek, and Russian, plus one additional language written in Cyrillic letters that I cannot identify.

So, here are 14 different languages written in almost 14 different alphabets, some using Cyrillic letters, some using varieties of Latin letters with extra letters for each language, and of course one using the Greek alphabet.

Now I know why my little croissant package is larger than before. Maybe the bigger package justifies a higher price. Who knows?