Is the economy in a recession?
When I travel around the Philippines, it's not just BGC. I notice that restaurants are packed everywhere.
The malls are crowded too.
Wages are low, so how can people eat out all the time?
Just a guess, but from what I've seen, at least a third of the people in malls aren't there to buy anything big, they're just hanging out in the aircon. I went to MOA last week and half the people at IKEA were sitting on the display sets scrolling on their phones, and one family let their kids completely wreck the bed displays.
Top net worth group... money coming from overseas..... plus Filipinos don't save. I pay several employees 50k-150k a month, and whatever the level, it's all gone within a week or goes into ridiculous house and car installments. Live for today and someone will help tomorrow — that's how it is living here.
Some people can afford it. Enough to fill the malls. There's a pretty big middle class (the people driving the SUVs that clog the roads all over Manila). A lot of people can't, though. Weird question. I don't see what this has to do with expats 🤔
Some people, sometimes including me, feel this way. For some people it feels like the only reasonable choice. Why save when government officials steal from us? Prices keep going up, and saving feels like depriving ourselves of the little joys we can still have. So we spend money at restaurants and malls. We use credit cards or borrow money to buy things, and tell ourselves we'll somehow pay it back later. Until one day we find ourselves buried in debt.
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