While waiting for our morning metro the other day at a station in downtown Budapest we spotted this billboard on the other side of the tracks. If your Hungarian is poor enough that you can't tell what it is, it's an ad for a sale on table sugar at French-owned hypermarket chain Auchan. And in that case, a few words about what it all "means" may also be in order.

Now, it's been a while since we've ridden the subway in, for example, New York. But our guess is that if you pop into a station in Soho or the Upper East side, you don't see big billboards advertising discounts on sugar. That's because sugar is an insignificant line in the average monthly food bill of even the most dirt-poor American consumer. Same for the average local reader of this website, who probably didn't know that Ft 169 (€0.67) is a good price for a kilo of kristálycukor.

The sad fact, however, is that even for many Hungarians in the center of Budapest, the difference between an expensive bag of sugar and a cheap one is not only noticeable, but important. This in turn helps to illustrate how far the local economy has to go before there is a mass market in Hungary for the sort of gourmet lifestyle that many of us tend to take for granted. It also helps to underscore how idiotic it is that so many of the restaurants that open in Budapest these days are so expensive that even rich fools like us feel like sugar-hoarding peasants when we crack the menu.

Sorry to start this (holiday-shortened) week with such a downbeat post, but it's an important point that we felt needed to be driven home. Oh, and speaking of downbeat, in case you are part of the majority that do worry about shaving forints on discount sugar, the sale ended last Thursday.