South Africa prices

October 3, 2007 1:56 AM

Does anybody know what is the average price of 1 liter gasoline in South Africa (Port Elizabeth) and newsstand prices of: Int'l Herald Tribune, Financial Times and Le Monde? Thank you
posted by juva to shopping (4 comments total)

Petrol price is just over R7 in Jo'burg so it will be just under that at the coast.
posted by PenDevil at 3:41 AM on October 3, 2007

And if no-one comes through for the other prices you could try contact CNA which sells newspapers and magazines amongst other things. Their contact page for the group is here, but you may have more luck phoning an individual store located through here (choose Eastern Cape and then Port Elizabeth).

As for gasoline (which we call petrol), the prices are fixed so will be the same for all service stations in an area. You can see up to date prices as well as forecasts in the changes of prices here. As PenDevil mentioned the prices are different at the coast, so you want to look at the Coastal Prices Table, in the column Pump Prices. This shows yesterdays price at 667 cents, i.e. R6.67 (per litre) with a small increase due today.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 4:24 AM on October 3, 2007

You are most likely not going to find the Int'l Herald Tribune, Financial Times or Le Monde at CNA, unfortunately. I've been to a few -- in various parts of Pretoria, which is a pretty big city -- and they only carry South African papers, plus the international weekly editions of right-wing UK titles (the Telegraph and the Express, to be specific). A downer, to say the least.

In their stead, you could opt for the weekly Mail & Guardian (which reuses a lot of copy from the UK's Guardian). It's about R15. And The Weekender is quite good too, besides being the best looking paper in SA (it was less than R10 last time I checked).

Magazines, though, are much more readily available. You should get titles like The Economist without a problem. CNA and Exclusive Books both have sizeable periodicals sections.
posted by macdara at 7:28 AM on October 3, 2007 [1 favorite has favorites]

I lived in Durban for a few months, there are very few newspaper choices generally and they are usually targetted at a South African national audience and you will tend to find not much plurality of voice in the media. I found newspaper readers generally only got it for the tv listings. The personal ads though, are much more personal than anywhere I have seen and border on softcore. I loved reading those.

Getting back to news - I can't remember which, but one of the tv stations would switch to CNN International at night (which is much better than the US version, or at least it was) so that is a reasonably good news source. I am not sure of its broadcast area, but a shortwave radio generally can get someone the BBC world service which is a great English language news source. The South African media likes to cover crime, violence and disease news to a terrifying extent, and I found it hard to pay attention to.

You might have to get these International papers through the mail because they will be hard to find, and it will be cheaper/faster to get online editions.
posted by Deep Dish at 1:13 PM on October 3, 2007