Myanmar can be surprisingly expensive.
There’s the rent, for one, in which the prices of exorbitant, unfurnished apartments of dubious quality leave buyers continuously puzzled.
But eating is affordable, even at the slew of fast food restaurants that have hit Yangon in recent months.
At KFC and Pizza Hut, the prices resemble the prices elsewhere and are sometimes lower in an effort to make it within reach of many consumers.
Not so at Myanmar’s only Burger King, which opened earlier this month in the new international at Yangon’s airport.
The restaurant is after passport control, but being tireless investigative journalists we obtained a photo of the menu, and after examining it in detail, we quickly filled with rage.
As is plain to see, it will cost you $8.50 to have a standard “value” whopper meal (you have to love that word in this context). The price is, weirdly, in dollars, so that will come out to around 10,000 kyats.
If you start getting greedy and want more on your burger, ya know, like cheese, the price goes up.
The whopper with bacon and cheese meal costs more than $10, and the triple whopper with bacon and cheese (honestly, we didn’t know that even existed until now) will set you back $14.50.
Now, food at airports is generally more expensive than food not at airports. But since when did that become an excuse? Have a little heart Burger King. You are a fast food restaurant in Myanmar, not a gourmet food truck in Hong Kong.
And the Yangon airport isn’t exactly a big international hub with skytrains and what not like Singapore, JFK or Dubai.
Travellers who encountered the menu but had no choice but to satisfy their junk food craving were shocked and dismayed.
Yangon resident Marcus Allender, who runs a travel business, provided a colorful account of his sticker shock to Coconuts Yangon.
“The new terminal has a ridiculous, meandering layout and it takes a long time to find your way to Burger King,” he wrote in a message, conceding that “there is a lovely view of the runway.”
“And I’ve never had a Triple Whopper with bacon and cheese before. But on balance I’d have to say it was a total rip off.”
He said it came out to about 17,000 kyats when factoring in the conversion.
