Grocery Shopping

Yes, I am writing a blog about grocery shopping. It may sound dull (and it may very well be by the time I finish), but as it turns out this is a good sample of the service-oriented society. Many places in this country offer assistance for almost any aspect of your daily life. Most of the restaurants offer delivery to wherever you are. This even extends to fast food establishments.

So back to groceries. At home in the US, we went to the store once every 2-3 weeks and did a monster load to restock the cupboards. With the smaller refrigerator we have here we need to replace that big trip with more frequent but smaller trips. The shelf life for perishable foods seems shorter as well. Our theory, at least for the local breads and such is that there aren't as many preservatives.

We went to the Abela store not far from our flat to get a load for the upcoming week. It is very much like the British stores (Spinney's, Waitrose) here with their selection of foods, meaning that we don't recognize many of the brands. There are enough familiar American names around to keep us happy, though. We even saw packages of Phillips Crab meat (a Baltimore brand). The label indicated that it came from Indonesia, though!

If you have read this far, you are probably wondering where this is all going. At the checkout line at the store, we pull our cart up and before we could start placing items on the counter for the cashier, one of the workers took over and emptied our cart for us. He then walked around and started bagging. That's service I have not experienced at home. On top of that, he pushed the cart to our car and loaded the groceries into the back seat.

This is just one example of how there are people all over the place here to help us through any task that requires effort. There are some people who are quite happy with this level of service, but we are much more of a do-it-yourself family so we are still getting used to this.