A quarter as much at just shy of double the price: Hong Kong retail in a nutshell
Purchasing anything aside from the lowest-quality, subsistence-level, Hong-Kong-Chinese-cultural-normative goods in a brick-and-mortar shop in Hong Kong is a fool’s game. Unless you absolutely must have the thing immediately — and in that case good luck figuring out where to get it if it’s not something you’re already regularly buying — you’re much better getting it online (either on Taobao/Tmall or from the outside world) and waiting for it to show up. GNC Creatine is a specific example. The 1kg canister shown in the photo above cost US $32.99 on gnc.com (at the time of writing) whereas the only creatine monohydrate that I could find in the Hong Kong GNC shop I visited was the 250g canister on the right and it was a face-melting US $56.50 (after the currency conversion from HKD).