Life in Culebrón

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 differen...

I've talked about Spanish supermarkets before. Just as a quick recap. We have four decent sized supermarkets in Pinoso and I use them all. My choice is usually based on geography, wherever the car is parked. Sometimes on product - only two of the four for instance carry English Council House tea. Whilst I'm not at work I've started to use Día more frequently than I used to. This is because it's on our side of town and the car parking is good. Now I'm going to fall into all sorts of problems with stereotyping here so please forgive me. Día is exactly the opposite of the UK's Waitrose or Spain's Corte Inglés supermarket operations in both its products and its customer profile. Día sells some quality products but it is typified by cheap and, sometimes, low quality in the sense of industrially processed food. Día does not, generally, attract well heeled clients in search of premium product. Now you can already see the stress lines in my argument because the ...

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 custo...