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.

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.