Once upon a time when I lived in Bedrock, there were no grocery stores. No, not one.
I remember being in Bedrock during the summer of 1996. At the time, I lived in Hong Kong, but had felt led to move to Bedrock later that fall. I asked some of Bedrock's university students to go with me in a taxi (rickety van) to give me a tour of the grocery stores in town, so I'd know what to expect once I moved to Bedrock.
I explained to the students that I was looking for the store where they sold things to eat. I tried to explain packaged groceries, but the students' English level wasn't that developed, and I worried that my meaning got lost in translation. We drove around town for hours, and they seemed frustrated that the muddy outdoor markets were not meeting my standards for "grocery store." It finally dawned on me after several hours that there WERE NO GROCERY STORES in that entire county of 10 million people. I recall that to be a very, very, very sobering moment for me, because I had already decided to move there. How in the world could I live in a city without a single packaged item of food? I would soon learn. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. When I lived in Bedrock, I stood in line at the pig butcher's shed every Saturday morning. I rode my bike through mud several inches deep to buy veggies at the most primitive market you can imagine. Though Coke and Snickers don't qualify as food, they were oddly available and I would consume more of those than any person reasonably should. But these were not reasonable circumstances.
Every time I would leave to go to some place like Shanghai or Hong Kong (even America), I would go to import grocery stores and buy Betty Crocker cake mixes, macaroni and cheese mixes, hamburger helper, canned tuna, mayonnaise, cookies, chips, canned goods, spaghetti noodles, tomato sauce and anything I could find that would make my life easier. I would mail back as many as possible, and the items rejected by the post office (breakable items) found their way back to Bedrock inside my suitcases. Thus my suitcases were extremely heavy; I would either pull my back out trying to get these up five flights of stairs, or I would pay my taxi driver to help me carry it up.
Around the turn of the century, Fu Mart came to town. It was a Chinese-style Wal-Mart store, and it had a tiny import section. Sometimes we could buy popcorn, tuna and spaghetti noodles. I continued to buy groceries in the bigger cities, but I didn't have to buy quite as much in the big cities as I had in the early days.
At that time, there were no local online stores as there are today. Today, if I lived in Bedrock, I could order some packaged food items and have them delivered to my door. But this was not possible when I lived there.
So now I live in a city that has lots of foreigners, and it has import grocery stores. I try to go every now and then to buy some things to make my life easier. I can't afford to go there for everything, so the markets are still my main source of food.
You'll see that the carts at the import grocery store are not very large. They don't expect you to buy much, I guess. And cost is not the only reason you don't want to buy much. You do have to carry that basket of groceries up a flight of stairs to check out, and then somehow you have to get it home way across town without having a car.
But frankly, cost is the real deterrent to excessive spending at the import grocery stores. See these bottles of Clorox. They are 299 RMB each. And let me tell you, 299 RMB is equal to $50 U.S. dollars. FIFTY U.S. DOLLARS for a bottle of Clorox! (Did you just pass out when I said that?) And there are expat housewives that are stupid rich enough to buy this stuff, just because it is familiar looking, not realizing that the exact same kind of nice-smelling bleach is available at Chinese grocery stores under a Chinese label for about a dollar or two.
How many bottles of $50 Clorox have I ever purchased? If you said "none," you are correct.
I remember being in Bedrock during the summer of 1996. At the time, I lived in Hong Kong, but had felt led to move to Bedrock later that fall. I asked some of Bedrock's university students to go with me in a taxi (rickety van) to give me a tour of the grocery stores in town, so I'd know what to expect once I moved to Bedrock.
I explained to the students that I was looking for the store where they sold things to eat. I tried to explain packaged groceries, but the students' English level wasn't that developed, and I worried that my meaning got lost in translation. We drove around town for hours, and they seemed frustrated that the muddy outdoor markets were not meeting my standards for "grocery store." It finally dawned on me after several hours that there WERE NO GROCERY STORES in that entire county of 10 million people. I recall that to be a very, very, very sobering moment for me, because I had already decided to move there. How in the world could I live in a city without a single packaged item of food? I would soon learn. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. When I lived in Bedrock, I stood in line at the pig butcher's shed every Saturday morning. I rode my bike through mud several inches deep to buy veggies at the most primitive market you can imagine. Though Coke and Snickers don't qualify as food, they were oddly available and I would consume more of those than any person reasonably should. But these were not reasonable circumstances.
Every time I would leave to go to some place like Shanghai or Hong Kong (even America), I would go to import grocery stores and buy Betty Crocker cake mixes, macaroni and cheese mixes, hamburger helper, canned tuna, mayonnaise, cookies, chips, canned goods, spaghetti noodles, tomato sauce and anything I could find that would make my life easier. I would mail back as many as possible, and the items rejected by the post office (breakable items) found their way back to Bedrock inside my suitcases. Thus my suitcases were extremely heavy; I would either pull my back out trying to get these up five flights of stairs, or I would pay my taxi driver to help me carry it up.
Around the turn of the century, Fu Mart came to town. It was a Chinese-style Wal-Mart store, and it had a tiny import section. Sometimes we could buy popcorn, tuna and spaghetti noodles. I continued to buy groceries in the bigger cities, but I didn't have to buy quite as much in the big cities as I had in the early days.
At that time, there were no local online stores as there are today. Today, if I lived in Bedrock, I could order some packaged food items and have them delivered to my door. But this was not possible when I lived there.
So now I live in a city that has lots of foreigners, and it has import grocery stores. I try to go every now and then to buy some things to make my life easier. I can't afford to go there for everything, so the markets are still my main source of food.
How many bottles of $50 Clorox have I ever purchased? If you said "none," you are correct.
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