I want to write about the Pick and Pay, or maybe it's spelled Pic and Pay, I don't really remember right now, and I don't want to make the effort to find out. Just due to laziness/not wanting to get up right now/whatever. Anyway, my brother recently got a job at a Cub Foods, and I've noticed his growing obsession in grocery stores and comparing them to Cub, so I thought that I'd take a minute to describe one of the major grocery stores here for him, so I don't forget anything.
The shopping carts are real different. There's this contraption that looks like a cart that you can stack baskets on vertically. They have mostly the same food, the deli meats are kind of different. You don't seem to get as much meat in one package. They don't keep eggs in the cold stuff, they keep them on a shelf by the dry foods. Which seems odd, I didn't know you could not refrigerate eggs. They also have this stuff called "life long milk" which they also keep on a shelf and not in the refrigerated section. And it comes in cardboard cartons. So you buy milk warm in a box. The milk that I bought one of the first days here, so like December 30th let's say, hasn't expired yet; and it wont until the 16th of January. Yogurt lasts pretty long around these parts as well. Which, by the way, is spelled like "yoghurt". They also have "life long juice." And in addition to that, they have bottles of concentrated juice that you can buy. So what you do is buy this concentrated juice and dilute it in a glass, much like we have in the US. BUT they call concentrated juice "squash". It was confusing at first to see juice labeled "lemon lime squash," thinking that there was some sort of squash flavoring in the juice. The lemons here tend to be green. They must be picked earlier or something. But even lemon-flavored things are green. Lemon dish soap is green too. So I don't know what that's about. And when you buy produce, a person weighs it for you at a scale in the produce section and the weight of whatever you're buying dictates how much you pay. And the cashiers have chairs. And there's no conveyer belt thing to move your groceries along. And they charge you for plastic bags too. Which I think is pretty cool. That's about all I can think of.
