Article by Ionuţ Iordache, Sergiu Alexandru – Published Saturday, June 13, 2026 23:21 / Updated Saturday, June 13, 2026 23:21
If in Ciudad de México meat had already become a luxury with the budget at home, what happens when you land in California for the rest of the World Cup matches?
We kept the same stake: the famous blue 100 lei banknote. At the current exchange rate, that's about $22.
With my wallet ready for action, we entered a Ralphs supermarket in Los Angeles to see if the Romanian leu has any strength against the US dollar.
The bottom line? If in Romania, with 100 lei, you leave with a bag full of proteins and basic foods for a few days, in the City of Angels your budget evaporates on just five products.
No meat, no dairy, no flour or cornstarch. Here's what the tax receipt looks like, where the only good news was no tax on staple foods:
The American Dream vs. The reality from Bucharest
Comparing the basket in Kaufland Bucharest with the one in Ralphs Los Angeles is a painful exercise for the pocket of a Romanian tourist.
With the same amount with which you can buy chicken, flour, vegetables, eggs and cheese in Bucharest, in Los Angeles you can barely afford a vegetarian breakfast and some fruit.
A single cucumber in LA costs almost 9 lei – the amount with which in Romania you can buy a whole kilogram in full season. And if you want an egg case, at Ralphs you leave the equivalent of 36 lei, three times more than in any supermarket in the capital.
If we wanted to add all the products from the basket from Bucharest, they would have cost us around 65 dollars, that is, about 300 lei.
The wage gap
The discrepancy becomes really interesting when we look at it from the perspective of the locals. Here, the purchasing power equation is completely reversed from the experiment in Mexico.
If the average net salary in Bucharest exceeds 6,100 RON per month, in Los Angeles it is approximately 4,800 USD per month (equivalent to approximately 21,800 RON).
This means that a resident of Los Angeles earns almost 3.5 times more than a resident of Bucharest.
For an American earning $4,800, a $22.35 receipt at Ralphs is a tiny financial effort. But for a Romanian on vacation, the prices in LA are a test of survival.
