Grocery shopping in Third World countries
SPOILER ALERT!!
If you have the stereotypical vision in mind of Third World markets as seen in Hollywood movies, with 3-day old dead chickens hanging by their feet in the front window, you might end up disappointed.
In all the Third World countries I have been to, you can of course find local produce stands and even fruit carts. What you also find are relatively modern, well-lit, orderly stores that would be familiar in any US town. They have refrigeration and even bar code scanners.
That is not to say they are just like stores in the US or Canada.
Grocery shopping in Third World countries
One thing I saw in Cairo that I thought was just an Egyptian quirk was the way that produce is sold in the larger markets. Then I came to South America and found the exact same thing. I had been to South America before but I guess I just never went into any large store to shop for groceries.
Unlike in the US, cashiers will not weigh your produce then enter a code to calculate your cost. There is a person whose entire job is to do that. If you get in a checkout line and have not already had your produce properly weighed and marked, the cashier will not ring you up. Instead, you will be sent back to the produce department to do it right.
In the produce department, there is a person who will weigh each of your items then print out a sticker with the total price for each thing. Once all your produce has been weighed, the cashier back at the front of the store can simply scan all these stickers.
Another quirk I have found is the availability, or sometimes lack thereof, of certain categories of items. I noted in a previous article how Egyptians are crazy over Nutella. In Uruguay it is dulce du leche (caramel creme). There are many brands and varieties. What is conspicuously missing is peanut butter. It simply doesn’t exist here.
They have many varieties of nuts but no nut butters. They even have Nutella.
My AirBNB hosts led me to a little specialty store that actually carries peanut butter. There is only one brand and the cost is 140 pesos (~$4.97) for a 225g (8oz) jar. Considering how many hundreds of miles I might otherwise have to travel to find another jar of peanut butter, let’s just call that a bargain and move on.
Getting back to the stereotypical idea of sidewalk vendors, every Sunday in Montevideo there is a humongous outdoor market. They close down a huge swath of the city so that vendors can set up tables and booths in the streets. It takes up perhaps two or three parallel streets for 12-15 blocks each, plus ten or twelve cross streets for 5-10 blocks each. So an area of roughly 80 city blocks.
You can find almost everything imaginable. Electronics, produce, lingerie, cheese, tools, handicrafts, jewelry… It’s somewhat like flea markets in North America. Some vendors have brand new items while others have vintage. Some specialize on a certain type of item while it looks like others just cleaned out their attic and are selling all the junk that was stored in there. I found one table that literally sold nothing but shoelaces. They had them piled up in huge heaps. More shoelaces than I have ever seen in my life. So many that I felt compelled to take a photo lest no one believe me.
