Showing posts with label hiperber. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hiperber. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Excuse me - do you have coconut milk?

Have you ever noticed how things can be difficult to find in Spanish supermarkets? It seems to me that these Spanish shops arrange their products to a logic that I didn't share and I've had to learn. 

Imagine I want peanut butter. My Britishness tells me to look for it with the jam or honey but my recent experience tells me to look for it near the chocolate bars, near the Nutella. Peanut butter isn't a good example because peanut butter is about as Spanish as celebrations on the 4th of July. Nonetheless, the next time you're in a Spanish supermarket, provided you're not Spanish, look around and I'm sure you'll find things that don't quite mesh with your idea of where they should, logically, be. Why aren't the crackers with the pitta and other bread substitutes? Why is the juice distant from the pop? Why are the kitchen and toilet rolls not alongside the cleaning products?

In Pinoso we have quite a few supermarkets and each one of them has a different sort of atmosphere or feel. There are none of the really big ones, no Carrefour or Alcampo, but we are well served for a town of 8,500 souls. I use all of the supermarkets from time to time but my default is Consum. It's a Valencian firm and it's a co-op. Whoever manages the Pinoso Consum is aware of all the Britons in the area so, among the standard Spanish fare, and without ghettoising the products in some international section, you'll find lots of "British" products from Oxo and HP sauce through to pork pies and ordinary council house tea. Most other Consum stores do not have the same range.

I have Consum's app on my phone. As I prepare my weekly list I can usually visualise where the products are in the aisles of the Pinoso shop. It's a bit like that Sherlock Holmes thing of seeing the action and reaction stuff but without falling over the Reichenbach Falls. When I occasionally end up in the Consum in Petrer or Sax it throws me completely that the organisation of the shelves is not the same. In Día or HiperBer or Spar I often wander around for ages wondering where they are hiding the Tabasco, the dried fruit or the sherry vinegar.

It's easy enough when you can ask. For instance I want tahini and the app says they stock it. I have no idea where it will be. All I need to do is to ask for sesame paste in Spanish and Robert is your parent's brother. Obviously they don't have the tahini but that's a different problem. Recently I've been shopping for a couple of people who currently have a bit of trouble getting out and about. They wanted crispbread. Crispbread could be in any one of four separate places. I had no idea what sort of packaging I might be looking for and there is no obvious translation. Neither is there a well known product - like British Ryvita - to compare it with. After a bit of a conference two of the shop workers sent me to the section with cream crackers and Tuc biscuits.

Ah, the excitement of a humdrum existence.

Thursday, December 08, 2016

1898, films and imaginary yellow car parks

Apparently the bank holiday in Spain today, Immaculate Conception, is to show how much the state believes in the dogma that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born without original sin. Oh, and because a surrounded Spanish army of 5,000 soldiers was able to grab victory from the teeth of defeat after finding a representation of the Immaculate Conception during a battle in the 80 Years War in Flanders. I have no idea when the 80 Years War was but one of the eighty was 1585.

On Tuesday it was Constitution Day, another bank holiday. So this week has been more time off than time at work. Paid time off is one of my favourite things.

It's been a quiet day. The weather hasn't been great, things are closed and Maggie's not here so I basically stayed at home.

I did go to the pictures though. I went to the pictures yesterday too. It's a good thing to do when you're by yourself. I highly recommend Animales nocturnos/Nocturnal Animals. Very striking production all together. Today though it was 1898. Los últimos de Filipinas. This tells the story of the siege of a church in the village of Baler, a church that had been fortified by the Colonial power, Spain, after they'd had a bit of trouble with Filipino Revolutionaries. The siege began in July 1898 and went on for 337 days until June 1899. What the Spanish soldiers didn't know was that Spain had surrendered the Philippines, the very last remnant of its once enormous empire, to the United States in December 1898. The Spaniards at Baler were fighting to defend an empire for six months after it had ceased to exist. Pity they didn't find another painting.

Anyway, as I drove home the roads were strangely quiet. Everyone tucked up at home getting in some sofa time I suppose. But a HiperBer supermarket was open and the cats need to eat. HiperBer isn't one of the upmarket supermarkets. There were a bunch of already drunken blokes laughing, gurgling, back slapping and topping up the drinks cabinet as I shopped. HiperBer boasts a vibrant colour scheme. Very yellow. I thought their car park looked very strange. It reminded me of the style of Animales nocturnos so I took a snap and wrote this entry.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Thick cut marmalade

I met Maggie as she left work today and on the way home we went food shopping. Maggie told me we were saving money because she had some sort of customer loyalty voucher. I suspect we may have saved more by not going in the shop at all though following my plan to its logical conclusion we would starve to death.

Based on a mix of store layout, friendliness, price and choice the shop we went to, Consum, is probably my favourite of the four larger Pinoso supermarkets. Recently I've done more of the food shopping than Maggie so, as we moved around the shop, I was playing the tour guide on new lines and innovations. What I hadn't really noticed, until today, was how many "British" items the shop now carries.

It was around 3pm when we were shopping, a time when most Spanish people are getting their lunch. The only Spaniards in the store were the workers. All of the customers appeared to be Britons. Obviously whoever does the buying for our Consum had noticed this customer profile long before me and that's why Consum sells Cheddar cheese, thick cut marmalade, Sharwoods pastes, chillis, kidney beans, Heinz tomato soup and lots of other Brit familiar produts. I suppose it's why masymas has in store adverts in English too.

Here's a blog entry I thought.

Now as I said there are four biggish supermarkets in Pinoso as well as a couple of local food shops. I thought that if I were going to mention Consum I should do the same for Día, Hiperber and masymas. You might not think so but I try to be reasonably even handed when I write this blog. So I Googled the supermarkets for a bit of background info and I was quite surprised by what I found.

Hiperber is the simplest story. They set up about forty years ago in nearby Elche with a philosophy of larger retail units when other food shops were still pretty small. They tend to be no frills stores and they seem to be doing fine as a small, regional chain.

Día is another no frills business. It runs on a policy of limited product lines and lots of own brands to keep the stores firmly at the cheaper end of the market. I vaguely knew that Día had something to do with the Carrefour chain and that it ran as a franchise operation. It turns out that my Carrefour information is out of date. The businesses separated in 2011 and of the 4,781 Día shops in Spain only around 1,650 are franchises. Día seem to have done alright out of the problems of other food retailers. They bought the ailing Arbol supermarkets for just 1€ in 2014 and, in 2015, they took advantage of the financial problems of the third largest food retailer, Eroski, to buy lots more shops. Eroski had run into problems because of its huge investment in shopping centres at the height of the building boom.

Masymas was a surprise. Más y Más means more and more and I thought that was the name of the shop. Actually the name seems to be masymas - lowercase and just one word. It's not simply one compay either; it's four different companies that have very similar logos and, I think, share some bulk buying, Our local shop is one of fifty seven shops that can trace their roots back to a dried and cured food business that opened in Villajoyosa at the tail end of the 19th Century.

And Consum? Well it's a co-operative with nearly all the workers being partners in the business. Apparently it's the largest co-op in Valencia. They formed in 1975 and were later a founding part of the Eroski group until the two businesses parted ways back in 2004. They also have a franchise arm which trades as Charter supermarkets.