[mickeymounds]

Turkey topping the “fewest hours” list doesn’t mean “everything is great”; it just means that for a single renter the price of a minimal basket divided by typical local net hourly pay is low in time terms. We’re measuring affordability in hours, not product quality.

Quality: Out of scope here. The basket is priced to minimal staples (rent, basic utilities, staple groceries, local transit). We’ll add a “quality bands” sensitivity so readers can see how hours move if you upgrade items.

Big-Mac Index: That’s a tradables proxy and food-only. Our hours include rent + utilities, which usually dominate time cost. Also, you used minimum wage; we use typical/median net hourly pay—minimum-wage calculations will overstate hours vs our method.

Your math note: €540 ÷ €12.82 ≈ 42 hours, but again, that’s food-only and gross wage, so it isn’t comparable to our basket or denominator.

Happy to post Turkey’s component line-items (rent/utilities/food/transit) and the sources in the article for auditability.