Showing posts with label día. Show all posts
Showing posts with label día. 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.

Monday, July 31, 2017

Easily amused

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 one in Pinoso has plenty of British clients and, again generalising, we're not a hard up community. It's a touch of that Lidl/Aldi mentality - there are bargains to be had for the careful shopper and the other stuff can be bought elsewhere.

I'm beginning to really like Día. All of the supermarkets in Pinoso have their adherents and all of them will tell you how friendly the staff are. Personally I think the people in Consum and at Día are pleasant whilst the Más y Más and HiperBer people are neither pleasant nor unpleasant. But the women on the till in Día seem to go out of their way to say hello to people. The food varies in quality. With a bit of care you can save a fair amount of money and get perfectly reasonable product. It's not the easiest supermarket to shop in though. The aisles seem to block up easily, I still find the layout illogical and there seems to be a mentality amongst Día shoppers to take up the maximum space, to talk at maximum volume and to choose product at the minimum pace. Waiting for a family group to choose a flavour of yoghurt, a family group that is blocking access to the packet of butter that I can't quite get to, can be very frustrating. The shelf stacking staff can be nearly as bad - they seem quite oblivious to my attempts to slide between their palette cart loaded with pop to get to the diet Fanta as they chat about football. The till area is another weak spot. One of them seems to be used as the makeshift office. It is always piled high with paperwork and it is never open. There seems to be an unwillingness to open a second till until the queue has snaked well past the fresh fruit stand and is passing the pickled gherkins.

So far then not a glowing report. But the place is just bursting with life. There are always incidents. Often the incidents involve my compatriots. Confusions with language, confusions about the price, about the queuing structure, about the money off coupons. There are also the strange conversations I have with Spaniards - usually as they let me go before them because I only have a packet of peanuts and a bottle of brandy - conversations about my food habits.

Today, for instance, I did something very Spanish. I put my stuff on the cash desk belt and, whilst the man in front's stuff was going through the scanner, I rushed off to pick up the bread that I'd forgotten. When I came back the man in front of me still hadn't had all of his things go through the checkout but a couple of Britons were grumbling about bloody Spaniards leaving their stuff and then going off. They were standing over my things and they had already usurped the Spanish bloke behind me. After a little chat about who owned what they went to the other till. As they left I asked the Spanish bloke why he hadn't said anything - "It's what I expect," he said.

The other day a group of Britons had bought loads and loads of stuff. They'd brought lots of old carrier bags to load it into too and they hung each newly filled bag on the back of a pushchair that contained a toddler. There was a flurry of argument about who was going to pay. As everyone, including the pram pusher, proffered biggish banknotes and deluged the grinning checkout woman in a flood of English, the pram overbalanced and toddler and supermarket produce spilled everywhere. All the people, maybe six or seven of them, scrabbled for rolling oranges, cans of pop and bawling children as fifty euro notes drifted back and forth in the gentle breeze from the sliding door.

Another bottle of brandy and some onions. A Scottish pal let me queue jump. The woman in front of me was a Culebrón resident. Strange conversation in English to my left, in Spanish to my right and in Spanish again across the little perspex shield of the checkout.

I'm sure there's an advertising slogan in there somewhere for Día.

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.