More on Shopping

After my last post about shopping, I thought of a few more interesting things about shopping here. At least if you stretch the definition of interesting. Here goes:

Milk doesn’t come in gallon jugs. I’m pretty sure we’re the only civilization on Earth that consumes enough milk to make that feasible. Maybe the Canadians do. But nobody else. In India, the milk comes in 500ml pouches for about 30 cents each. You cut off the corner and fold the pouch over itself to reseal it. This actually works well. The web site says it comes in 1L cartons, but I haven’t seen any of those. If they do exist, they aren’t the norm. At stores, huge heaps of 500ml packets are the norm.

The shopping carts here handle like a dream. For starters, they’re all well-calibrated. I haven’t yet encountered a sticky or too-short wheel. Carts also tend to be smaller, which works with the smaller aisles. Again, compare to the huge aisles of large American stores where real estate is cheap. The carts at the Jewel and Dominick’s in downtown Chicago were small, too. The biggest change, though, is that the carts are four-wheel-drive. That is, the back wheels aren’t locked, which enables strafing. I never quite understood why the US does that, and this just reinforces that. You can maneuver around anything without turning the cart. Finally, the carts at SPAR are more of plastic stands for their shopping baskets. If you want a basket, you take one, and if you want it on wheels, you place it on one of the carts. If you want more space, you can put another basket on the bottom of the cart. This allows all parts to be stacked up really neatly, again saving on space.

Chocolate doesn’t melt in your mouth here. Regular chocolate would melt on the shelves at most stores here, and would certainly melt before it made it to your mouth. So Cadbury, the major chocolatier here, had to redesign its formula so chocolate could be sold, with the tradeoff of texture. They recently introduced Cadbury "Silk", in an attempt to achieve the best of both worlds, but it doesn’t really work. And it ain’t cheap.