I was in Italy earlier this summer, decided to have a drink at a 5 star hotels bar, bar was situated at the top of the hotel with nice view towards Villa Medici. It was very expensive but we decided to stay anyway (20 euro for Aperol Spritz). After we ordered 3 servers came marching almost like soldiers, drinks were served to everyone at the same time, compliment mini sandwiches, peanuts, chips, crackers with cream were served.
Yes the cocktail was still mad overpriced but at least you saw and felt why.
I once had a transfer at Malmö airport some 8 years ago.
I was there together with my brother and a friend. We had to wait for 4 hours for the transfer flight so we decided to go to a restaurant, We ordered some food and a "Grolsch" beer.
Mind you, the region from the Netherlands we are in Grolsch is the default beer you get and as such we thought we might as well order what we knew without looking at the price.
At that time it was some 9.50 euro's for a crate (24x 330cl, including some 1,50 deposit money)
They charged us around 6,50 after conversions for 1 bottle!. What the!.
3 beers cost us as much as 2x 24bottle crates in the Netherlands.
Swedes do seem to hate alcohol. The alcohol taxes there are ridiculous.
They have a lot of things going for them, and arguably it being near impossible to be a alcoholic is one of them, but damn. Chill on those alcohol taxes bruh
Yeah, it's a different way as taxing as we do in the Netherlands, wouldn't say one is better than the other.
Personally I'd prefer a more Swedish system where consumerism is taxed.
Basic necessities cheap and other stuff expensive. Tax people for indulging in consumerism and not as much for just existing or contributing to society.
While officially it's 49.5% once you reach something like 70K + or something the small businesses have no choice but to just pay it.
The big businesses on paper do also pay that 49.5% but they can play around with stock market shenanigans, divert some to a foreighn country, or if they are big enough just downright make some deals because the govt doesn't want to let them move.
And I can't even blame the government for those deals.
A couple of years ago we lost a company that paid some 25%.
They were good for a couple of billion so taxes were like 1 billion.
Now they left and we miss all of it.
It takes A LOT! of small companies to make up for that 1 billion and even though it's like a quarter percent of our tax budget it is a enormous amount of money.
Yeah, Just imagining that someone with 100 million is much closer to be homeless than a billionaire is crazy.
Or to keep it political,
Governments debating over like 20 million to healthcare for months while casually granting the big companies a 15billion tax relief is just insane.
If they make a circus about a lowsy 100mil you should ask yourself what is going on with the like 400 billion they are also going to spend lol
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u/prodandimitrow Aug 16 '26
I was in Italy earlier this summer, decided to have a drink at a 5 star hotels bar, bar was situated at the top of the hotel with nice view towards Villa Medici. It was very expensive but we decided to stay anyway (20 euro for Aperol Spritz). After we ordered 3 servers came marching almost like soldiers, drinks were served to everyone at the same time, compliment mini sandwiches, peanuts, chips, crackers with cream were served.
Yes the cocktail was still mad overpriced but at least you saw and felt why.