Corner Shop

In the UK, most 'corner shops' are owned by Indians or Pakistanis. There was great resentment when these hard-working and enterprising immigrants arrived in the UK, bought these properties and worked their grollies off in them for at least twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week. 'Corner shop' is a catch-all phrase for a small grocery/general store. The idea that these immigrants were 'taking our jobs' is complete rubbish, of course. Very few Brits were prepared to put in the hours that the Asians did.

In Spain, the corner shop is called an 'alimentacion' - basically, a food shop. But because they are mostly owned and run by Chinese, they are also known as 'chino's'. I'm in no position to judge how the Spanish feel about these places: all I know is that they can usually sell you an onion (or pretty much anything else) at midnight. It will be a pricey onion, mind, because a) they don't have the buying power of big supermarket chains, and b) they understand supply and demand.

The reason I'm wibbling on about this now is that I've just witnessed a fairly unpleasant incident at my local Dia supermarket. Dia is owned by Carrefour, and their prices are similar to Lidl or Aldi. It's a no-frills establishment. Ever since I've been shopping at Dia (I avoid their meat, and they don't do fish), I've noticed that whenever I was in a hurry to get in and get out (which is nearly always: I can't stand the place), there would be one or two Chinese with one or two trolleys stacked to the gunwhales with stuff. Not the kind of shopping you do for a household: more the kind you do for your corner shop - 48 x 2 litre bottles of Coca Cola, 6 cases of Heineken, etc. Basically, they were using the place as a wholesaler. This might be ok, but because it's a budget operation, Dia usually doesn't have the staff to operate more than one checkout at a time, and so everyone gets held up while these vast quantities of stuff are being processed.

So, today I was in the usual quite long queue and I could hear shouting at the front of the store. As I got closer to the checkout, I could see a Chinese woman with a trolley being denied entrance by the quite-well-built manageress. I don't know if this signals a new policy by Dia, or if the manageress was just feeling vindictive against this particular woman. But neither of them was giving any ground, and when my modest pile of shopping was halfway through being checked-out, the cashier suddenly locked up the till and she and half of the queue rushed to surround the manageress and the Chinese woman, because they were on the edge of beating each other to a pulp (that's a lie, actually, the Chinese woman would have been slaughtered). Things calmed down a little, the cashier came back, I paid for my stuff, and then had to walk past the combatants. The Chinese woman had started up her yelling once more, and as I passed her I invited her to 'fuck off', and to 'shut the fuck up'. She had no idea what I was saying, but the manageress did.

I might be up for a free bar of chocolate next time I go there.

La Vuelta del Tornillo [The Turn of the Screw]

This might turn out to be a bit of an anti-Chinese rant. If it does, I apologise. It's actually a rant against people who think that the cheapest possible thing can also be the best thing, even if it doesn't work properly.

What's brought this on, Keefie?

Well, when you move into a new home, you inevitably have to do things like putting up shelves, or hooks, or whatever. And you also have to get all your electrical gadgets working. We shipped a fair amount of electrical stuff from Dubai - computers, monitors, printers, phone chargers, and sundry other stuff. Half of the gadgets have Brit-style 3-pin plugs, and the rest have crappy 2-pin jobbies. It so happens that Spain uses crappy 2-pin jobbies, so we needed to get adaptors for the 3-pin plugs. The sensible place to get adaptors would be a Ferreteria. These are lovely, old-fashioned places that sell ironmongery, hardware, tools etc. Be advised, I have never come across one that sells ferrets. They are almost all family-run, mom 'n' pop type places, which means, of course, that they will not be open at the times when I want to buy the stuff I need - typically Sundays.

So, one Sunday, I want to buy a couple of 3-pin to 2-pin adaptors. All the Ferreterias are shut. But all is not lost; the Chinese we-sell-absolutely-everything-for-your-house shop is open. So I buy the afore-mentioned adaptors, probably for 50 cents each, and I go home and try to use them. By crikey, it's a tight fit to get the 3-pin plug into the front end, and an equally hard struggle to get the 2 pins into the socket. But, it works. Some time later, I naturally need to unplug one device and connect another one, and at this point the front end of the adaptor decides to part company with the back end, leaving a lot of dangerously exposed, electrically live, metalwork in the socket.

Another weekend. I had bought a towel rail and some bathroom hooks from IKEA. I did not buy screws because IKEA stuff normally comes with the exact amount minus 1 and I was sure that my toolbox contained dozens of the blighters. Wrong on both counts. So I trundle off to the Chinese place and get a packet of screws. They pay me to take them away.

When I start the work I see why the screws are so cheap. When you give them that final twist to make sure they are nice and tight, the head snaps off. This is obviously not good because it is the tapered head that holds whatever you are erecting in place. The first time it happened I thought it was a one-off. But when the second screw did exactly the same thing I was somewhat dischuffed. It is incredibly difficult to get rid of the shaft of a broken screw once you've stuck it into your wall.

These two experiences have left me very wary of Chinese places in general. It does not make me feel good that I bought a couple of plug adaptors for 1 Euro, or a sackful of screws for 75 cents. The damn things didn't work, and I would have willingly paid three or four times what I did pay to get stuff that just does its job.

And then I read about the Chinese Chang-E 1 moon program somewhere. I can't remember where, but I got it into my head that the entire cost of the project, involving numerous unmanned launches, moon rovers and finally some Chinese dudes actually landing on the moon was supposed to be $95 million. I mean, are they gonna buy rivets and stuff from this we-sell-absolutely-everything-for-your-moonshot shop? How successful will that be?

But I just Googled the Chinese moonshot and was disappointed to see that the total cost of the project will be about $10.7 billion, which is a bit more like it.

Oh, and a week after the screw incident, and subsequently buying beautiful Spanish screws for 5 cents each, I discovered that my toolbox has a little chest of drawers built into the front. And the little drawers contain about 100 shiny brass screws of various sizes.

Haciendo la compra [doing the shopping]

Shopping in Madrid is quite different from shopping in the UK or shopping in Dubai. What I mean by 'shopping' is going out to buy edible and non-edible consumable stuff. Durable stuff also counts as shopping, of course, but I don't do it several times a week so I'm not talking about that now.

Spain seems quite attached to the idea of small general stores and specialised shops sprinkled throughout the town. I have not yet found an actual shopping mall in Madrid Centro. I'm sure there are some in the burbs, but I haven't been there yet. Same goes for hypermarkets. There are a few supermercados in/near the centre. There's a Carrefour Express in Lavapiés, a dreadful Dia (remember Kwik Save in the UK? This is worse) near Chueca, and half a million El Corte Inglés's all over the place.

El Corte Inglés is a weird institution. Modelled closely on the old-fashioned English department store idea, they develop in clusters of adjacent buildings and frequently occupy numerous floors. They seem to sell pretty much everything, usually at prices that are quite a bit higher than what you wanted to pay. They probably have half a dozen clusters in Madrid, and they are present in all major Spanish towns. Oddly, they do not seem to have any competitors.

But here's the thing. Because they are department stores, they feel obliged to position the cosmetics department inside the main entrance. This means that whenever you visit them you are assailed by this miasma of a thousand different aromas that permeates the air. Don't get me wrong, many of these aromas on their own can be quite pleasant. But put them all together and I literally want to puke. If you are ever in Madrid and you visit El Corte Inglés at Puerta del Sol, you might be able to catch a glimpse of El Git Inglés rushing around with a hankie clutched over his nose and mouth trying to get to or from the supermercado without suffering too much olfactory damage.

In the same way that UK corner shops were taken over by Asians (because they are prepared to work extremely long hours for virtually no money), many of the local alimentaciónes in Spain are run by Chinese.