There is one thing here which really gets my goat, and that is tax.
Ok, so tax, or taxman are pretty dirty words whatever country you live in, but here the problem is more than just the yearly return to the Inland Revenue. Specifically, tax here is the VAT imposed on every single thing that you buy - except, unlike in the UK, it is not built into the price. Instead, each state, and each area within each state has its own rate or tax, which is then added to the total of whatever you buy.
This morning, the Major and I went off to the gym to sign up, thinking it would be a good idea to try and burn off some of the excess calories from the enormous portions - and besides, we had heard that this particular gym did very good deals for military folk. The total for the remaining ten months of this year would be something like $457 for the two of us. Bargain, we thought. Only, we had forgotten about the tax - so the actual total was something over $500.
It's like this everywhere. You think that something is an incredible bargain at $2 or whatever, but forget about the tax. It's made more complicated by the different rates in different places, so you can't just do a simple sum in your head so as not to get such an enormous shock at the check out (although admittedly, I'm not very good at simple sums, and even less so when the figure is something like 1.756%). It's pretty disappointing, particularly when you're already having to do mental arithmetic to work out how much something is in pounds (although I'm sure that will fade eventually).
What I have yet to discern is whether Dollar General (the US equivalent of the pound store) figures tax into its prices, or whether everything is actually more than a dollar. I'll keep you posted.