In the UAE, a Big Mac meal costs approximately 35 AED ($10). On the other hand, a manual car wash - approx. 1-2 hours of labor - can cost you around 20 AED.
In other words, you could get almost two manual car washes for the price of a Big Mac.
(1) the middle class (and above) who have money to spend on services
(2) the migrant working class, the bulk of whom send every last extra penny back home as remittances to support family
The second class of people are not considered as a market for the majority of services in the UAE. In the case of food, when they do eat out, they frequent traditional, low cost/quality establishments.
As for why a Big Mac costs that much, labor definitely doesn’t have much to do with it. My impression is that prices continued to get pushed up as long as sales didn’t take a hit, which means it’s mostly pure profit.
Keep in mind that the median salary isn’t that high. Without looking it up, I would guess it’s approx $25k USD/year, but I haven’t lived there in a while.
Not a great car wash but probably $5-10 on the low end.
One should be uncomfortable the Arab States are doing so well. They have no democracy but seem to be thriving. Not expected post 9/11 imo.
They're just arbitraging cheap labour in your face instead of some farm field or factory overseas. For resource to local population ratio, it's supremely optimized - cheap migrant workforce does all the shit job locals don't want to do, don't have the numbers to do, without need for onerous social safety net of citizenship.
It's economically "fine", as in as "fine" as can be trying to pivot desert city from oil. It's morally broken because labours occasionally be slaves, even though largely everyone wins. UAE gets cheap labour, labour countries get remittance, labourers get life changing pay.
Like west already does this shit in some sectors (agri) and get cheap calories, UAE can't supply enough labour in all sectors and get cheap everything.
