In our neighborhood, there are several options for buying everyday things like groceries. We can shop in the open air market and several small corner shops. There’s only one large grocery store within walking distance. Like a lot of things here, the store seems a lot like a grocery store back home at first. When you start shopping though, you notice how different it actually is. This first picture is what the grocery store looks like when you walk in. The first difference you notice is the number of employees. There is a store employee in nearly every aisle.
Another difference is the organization. It can be hard to find things because they are stocked in places that don’t make very much sense to me. I assume it makes sense to Koreans. It this picture, the hair brushes and combs are next to the vegetable peelers.
They also have things you would not expect to find in a grocery story, like toilet seats. I’m not sure why, but all of the toilet seats in the store and the one in our apartment is the squishy plastic kind. And you can’t buy just a plain one, they all have loud patterns or strange sayings on them. The second picture is of a toilet seat with two dogs. It’s kind of hard to see but it says, “To know is nothing at all; to imagine is everything. Now the story of Pavel is started.” I have no idea what that is supposed to mean or why it would be on a toilet seat.
Another difference here is that many things like the shampoo are only sold in a super large size. In the picture below, you can see Pantene. These are around $10 a piece. But you can buy shampoo in plastic bags for less and use those to refill the more expensive bottles when they run out. This seems to be the case with a lot of cleaning products.
You can find some of the same food that you would see back in the States, but not many. There’s almost no cheese. There’s no salsa or tortillas. There are very few canned goods. There are, however, two entire aisles devoted to seaweed and one aisle with dozens of kinds of instant coffee. You can’t buy regular coffee in this store and all of the instant coffee is pre-sweetened.
This grocery store has two stories. The produce is in the basement. To get down there, you take your cart on an escalator/ moving sidewalk thing. The coolest part about it is that the grocery carts have magnets in their wheels. So, once you get on the escalator, the cart can’t move until you get to the bottom or top.
Here’s a watermelon that costs almost $20.
One thing that’s impossible not to notice here in Korea is the number of typos. They are everywhere.
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