> Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and a handful of minor outlying islands, the US maintains roughly 800 overseas military bases around the world.
Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in stores always show VAT included).
I was on one a couple times when they played a theatre play (Christmas Charol or so). Quite interesting.
I grew up around US military bases in Japan, and the same holds true : they're basically "little Americas" where you can pay in USD and buy Twizzlers (among other things, but I happened to like twizzlers)
An open question I have after reading your comment is whether or not this isn't true of other countries foreign miltary installations (like the French bases in Djibouti, etc.). Intuitively it seems like due to the nature of military installations, it makes sense to treat them like an extension of the home country - but I'd be curious to see if other countries approach it differently.
> Intuitively it seems like due to the nature of military installations, it makes sense to treat them like an extension of the home country - but I'd be curious to see if other countries approach it differently.
As silly as it might sound: There's no country to actually compare it to because the US is pretty much an outlier in terms of scale and intensity of their military bases on foreign ground.
That's also the reason why the US military building McDonalds in the middle of the Iraqi desert, during an invasion, became pretty much a meme encapsulating the whole of US foreign policy.
> There's no country to actually compare it to because the US is pretty much an outlier in terms of scale and intensity of their military bases on foreign ground.
In terms of scale, of course - but the US is not the only country with foreign military installations. Just off the top of my head, France, the UK and Russia all have long-term out-of-country bases.
Do literally none of these countries have anything that is remotely equivalent to a PX (seems unlikely)? If so, do they pay with their own currency or the local one, and are those transactions subject to local taxes? At the end of the day I expect it boils down to whatever SOFA is in place, but it's a legitimate question IMO.
I lived in Stuttgart a number of years ago, and used to drink with some guys who had a business exclusively selling American cars to American servicemen (in dollars; taxation deferred; big money). In fact, I spent a good bit of time drinking with American servicemen ... they were a large segment of the Anglophone community around there.
Background: Stuttgart hosts EUCOM at Patch Barracks and AFRICOM at Kelley Barracks.
The latter should have moved to Africa at least a decade ago, but America is still looking for an appropriate location (friendly, stable, infrastructure).
AFRICOM headquarters will remain in Germany indefinitely. In addition to the infrastructure problems in Africa (for instance, there are vast areas of the continent, including entire countries, where routine travel is prohibited due to lack of American-level medical or medevac services), there are too many rivalries amongst the nations for a headquarters to be placed in one country.
It's also not unprecedented: CENTCOM, SOUTHCOM, and arguable PACOM all have headquarters that are not in their respective areas of responsibility.
> I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price
No. VAT in Germany is not charged to American servicemen and women and dependants. This is covered under the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) [1]. One may also receive reimbursement of VAT paid on the economy, though that is subject to some restrictions at around €2500, I believe. There are specific rules on cars. The actual forms for receiving reimbursement are onerous enough that VAT forms aren't often used outside of major purchases.
I went to high school on an American military base in Germany in the 1990s. At least then, the major items of note were jeans and gasoline/diesel (though, I had a teenager's bias). Both were subject to significant taxation on the economy that Americans didn't need to pay on base. In practice, this meant there were some restrictions on how many jeans people could purchase at once, to prevent Americans from reselling them to the Germans. There were also special booklets that Americans could buy on base that had little tear-out pages; each page could be exchanged for a certain number of liters of fuel at, specifically, Esso gas stations on the economy. While fuel prices on base (the same rate as the booklets) were considerably more expensive than in the US, it was still far cheaper than off base.
Most of the goods available in stores on base were imported from the US [2]. All prices and payments were in dollars. We did not use pennies on the base, since they were too expensive to import. All bills/receipts were rounded to the nearest five cents [3].
I was told by a teacher at the time that the Rhine valley had "the single largest concentration of Americans outside of America." That specific area of US installations has grown in the intervening 20 years both due to the wind down of smaller Cold War-era bases scattered throughout Germany and due to the current conflicts the US is involved in, of which, most require US forces to deploy via Germany.
2015: "Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad"
It's not just military bases, the US DoS runs a whole Spa-resorts in Garmisch-Partenkirchen exclusively for US/NATO (excluding German nationals) military personnel [0].
In the 90s my sister was friends with a US soldier in Stuttgart so I got visit that environment quite a bit. It felt like a different world. Even the street layout of the areas where they lived were more like an American suburb than a German one.
> Department of Defense personnel stationed in or TDY to Europe may be eligible to use the U.S. Forces Tax-Relief Program to avoid paying this tax for their personal purchases. In other words, you may be able to have the sticker price reduced by extracting the 19% or 7% VAT when making qualifying purchases through a U.S. Forces VAT Office.
So, if these stores have primarily eligible customers, it stands to reason that the labeling would reflect that. (Rather than having the sticker price reduced, the sticker would reflect the reality of what you're going to pay.)
I am not sure about that though, this whole section says something different, and it's couched in various warnings and restrictions:
> Note: there exists NO direct entitlement to VAT relief of the individual member of the U.S. Forces! VAT relief only applies to procurements by a procurements agency of the U.S. Forces, here the VAT office. A contract shall not be concluded between the individual and the vendor as in such case VAT relief is not available.
The military has a special deal with the German government that sets out exactly how everything works. It is called a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).
Germany has a few US military bases. It’s a bit of a micro cosmos. People pay in USD and can buy American products there. I think even the VAT is added on checkout to the price (whereas in Germany, prices in stores always show VAT included).
I was on one a couple times when they played a theatre play (Christmas Charol or so). Quite interesting.