Yes we have only been there 3 times, but at Spencers at Mani Square Mall which is the closest thing we have to a real supermarket we are known to the staff already.
On saturday when we went there we were just wandering around getting the last minute things, and this guy who does the bagging (his shirt label says housekeeping) kept pestering us and trying to make us check out, although we werent yet finished getting things….but why….
What is weird here in the supermarket is there are rarely prices on the shelves, normally the only time a price is shown is when its a special offer, or deal. So to find the price you must search the actual item for a tiny label which will mention the price…very frustrating it is. Whats also weird is as you walk around staff come up and put things in your cart… but why, some just put them in, others say why. Its actually just free items we find out, like you buy 4 bottles of soda and you get a chocolate bar free, but its strange at first especially as the first 2 times it happened the staff just dumped them in our shopping cart and walked away… we just looked at each other with strange ‘huh’ looks and kept on shopping.
Meat is different here, we thought India would be a lot more liberal than it is. In Malaysia we had nice huge supermarkets there and they sold everything in them, although the pork products were kept behind a glass walled area that looked like it was a porn shop, and it had a separate air supply so as to not contaminate the other people in the store. But India isn’t like this, in the supermarket we have just fish and chicken, with some mutton (aka goat) and some pork sausages and bacon and ham. The chicken isn’t what we are used to either. They have whole chickens, with skin or without, drumstick packs, boneless chicken and curry chicken which includes bones and attached gizzards. The boneless chicken is all different meats, for instance in one pack we got half a breast, the ass flap, and a lot of thigh meat… hummm . I know that most people here don’t eat meat, and when they do they walk down to their local market and the man kills the chicken, plucks and guts it for you so you get to take home a freshly killed, still warm chicken! But for us this isn’t the way although its probably the best meat, and plus we don’t have a market near us anyway.
Although I don’t want to know the mercury content of the seafood, it is suprisingly cheap and good. Just this weekend we bought 1kg of huge tiger prawns for Rs300 or $6 ! They even clean them, devein them and take off the heads and shell while you wait.
So back to the checkout stage….when we were ready to leave we were lining up at a empty register, only to be told we must go to number 2….but why is it our skin color? We oblige and go to number 2 even though it has a line of people waiting at it, then it dawns on us, well it dawned on Cindy first, I was a little slow on the update, it was the same guy we had had as our cashier the last 2 times, and now he has adopted us it seems.
Checkout is an affair, I suppose its because we are spending the average monthly wage on food to support our eating habits…maybe not…but what happens is you are nicely pushed aside and offered a chair (it can take about 20 minutes to checkout, its no fast affair here), one guy takes your cart and starts emptying it, the cashier goes to work and the bagger sorts and bags, sometimes you get a sorter too so that everything is sorted perfectly. If all goes well the computer wont crash too, but 80% of the time, when he hits total it crashed and the whole transaction must be recovered, this isnt just in the store, it seems to happen a lot in the stores here.
From our balcony we get to see everything , I love these trucks, now who would think of putting a load of gravel or sand in a truck that has no feature to dump the load! It is loaded and unloaded by hand!!! You can see the loader boys riding on top and in the cab.
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