Shopping
Shopping on St Maarten and Saint Martin offers duty-free goods in numerous boutiques. Popular goods include local crafts & arts, exotic foods, jewelry, liquor, tobacco, leather goods, as well as most designer goods. Most often the designer goods are offered at significant discounts, often up to 40% lower than US retail prices.
Saint Martin uses the euro as its currency, while Sint Maarten uses the Netherlands Antillean guilder, pegged at 1.79 per United States dollar. As a consequence of the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles, the Netherlands Antillean guilder will cease to be legal tender and be replaced by the Caribbean guilder in 2012. Almost every store on the island also accepts the United States dollar, although sometimes a more expensive exchange rate is used (even 1 to 1 is no exception).
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Famous quotes containing the word shopping:
“The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“Shopping seemed to take an entirely too important place in women’s lives. You never saw men milling around in men’s departments. They made quick work of it. I used to wonder if shopping was a form of escape for women who had no worthwhile interests.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“The most important fact about our shopping malls, as distinct from the ordinary shopping centers where we go for our groceries, is that we do not need most of what they sell, not even for our pleasure or entertainment, not really even for a sensation of luxury. Little in them is essential to our survival, our work, or our play, and the same is true of the boutiques that multiply on our streets.”
—Henry Fairlie (1924–1990)