Grocery Stores
The key to cultural understanding.
On your next vacation, if you want to learn all about the country you’re visiting, pop into the local grocery store, the one the locals shop at.
Consider it an ethnographic exploration as you watch the grandmas select their melons or the 20-somethings grab frozen pizzas and yogurt. Study the spice section and the candy and chocolate aisles—maybe take home a few of the ones you’ve never heard of.
An army marches on its stomach, but so does the intrepid tourist, which is why what I love best about America is the grocery stores.
The bigger, the better.
Okay, maybe not the best, but I swoon over the long, luxurious aisles wide enough to land an aircraft carrier. No jostling with other shoppers in a bumper cart deathmatch as you search for the perfect avocado or load up on heaping bags of perfect Washington cherries.1
Yes, everything seems possible here in the good old U.S. of A., just so long as the dizzying array of choices doesn’t paralyze you; just how many types of toilet paper or potato chips does one nation need?
While most Americans take Costco-sized grocery stores for granted, space and choice are at a premium in Europe.
There are only two Swiss grocery stores: Coop, Migros, and the occasional Aldi (German-owned). None are supersized, and none offer bulk discounts. This is true throughout most of Europe because dizzying choice is not a thing consumers demand, so stores don’t feel pressured to provide it. That might sound great—fewer choices = better for the planet and less stress—but only if the limited choice intersects with your needs. If not? Well, too bad.
And I know you think food is expensive in the US right now, but you haven’t wept genuine tears of pain until you’ve bought beef in Switzerland.
Switzerland has the highest meat prices in the world: a whopping 142% more than the global average. To give you an idea, a one-pound rib-eye would cost about 50 dollars. Chicken isn’t much better; half a small chicken breast is around 9 dollars. Make it organic, and it’s upwards of thirteen dollars. Ouch.
Let’s discuss sausage smuggling.
No, the actual sneaking of meat across the border from France or Germany.
Even though Switzerland is part of the Schengen agreement, that’s not the same as being part of the EU.2 Like Norway, Switzerland doesn’t use the Euro and is a closed market. To protect its farmers, the Swiss impose import duties and strict quotas on dairy and meat imports.
Because I live minutes away from France and Germany, I regularly sneak shop across the border, where food is half the price. If the number of Swiss plates in those grocery store parking lots is any indication, many Swiss are doing the exact same thing.
It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game trying to sneak your trunk full of groceries past the Swiss border police, who regularly stop and search cars entering the country. Sure, they’re looking for drugs and weapons, but they are also hunting for sausages and milk. Additionally, the total limit of goods you can bring across the border is less than 150 dollars. Not much.
If you’ve attempted to bring in one too many wedges of brie from France, they can and will haul you out of your car and slap you with a hefty fine. It’s happened to me and everyone I know, and it stinks—not the brie, the expense and the humiliation.
Grocery shopping is a daily chore.
No one here is stocking up for the week. This is due to a few things, but mainly, in Switzerland and Germany, cultural norms require mothers to stay home and care for young children, and they are then expected to do the household shopping.3
Refrigerators are minuscule, so there’s no place to store your perishables. To give you a visual, I once made my son a birthday cake (standard 9 inches), set it on a dinner plate and tried to put it in the fridge... I could not shut the refrigerator door unless I tipped the plate on its side, even after I’d emptied half the fridge to make room—when I say small, I mean tiny. Some may pine for a fancy car or a designer bag, but when this girl dreams, she dreams of double doors and an ice maker.
Moreover, there remains an emphasis on home cooking—you’ll need fresh ingredients to do that, and since there’s no room for it in the doll-sized fridge, it’s off to the store you go to pick up ingredients for tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch.
Lunch? Who has time to cook lunch, you say? Well, friend, Swiss and German kids come home for lunch; school lunches aren’t a thing—yet another reason one parent (always the woman) needs to be at home.
But perhaps the worst thing about shopping is the intense social pressure to do it right, and there is only one right way.
Rules on how to conduct yourself in the grocery store:
a) Never stop your cart in the aisle.
It’s grab-and-go, baby. Don’t slow down, and don’t even think about blocking the bananas.
b) Never hold up the line.
Keep your shopping light and keep things moving, or else you will suffer the withering social condemnation of the people behind you in line. If an eye-roll were audible, you’d hear them banging around like marbles in the heads of the people you’ve so rudely inconvenienced by buying more than needed for the next 24 hours.
Your heart pounds as you rush to get everything bagged while a log jam piles up at the end of the conveyor belt, bashing your cherries and crushing your lettuce. When the last item rolls down that black belt, you’d better be done because, even if you're not, you’re done; if you're still bagging, it’s too bad for you. The line pushes forward, and you’ll have to squeeze by the person behind you to get back to the card machine and pay. They’ve moved into position, ready for the starting gun. Move it, sister! Now it’s my turn.
So intense is the pressure to bag at breakneck speed that many people doing a larger shopping forego it altogether, tossing their scanned food directly back into their carts. They will sort it all out at the car when they have time to breathe and can spare themselves the agony of dumping a watermelon on top of a carton of eggs or suffering the comments and exasperated sighs of their fellow shoppers.
Back in the US, my family strolls calmly down airconditioned freeways of food.
We exalt in this absolute billionaire’s level of choice and copious personal space like we just got a first-class upgrade on a long-haul flight.
Hooray?
When my son was younger, we used to have “vacation cereal.”
Every summer when we went on holiday in the US, he was free to choose whatever disgusting sugar and food-coloring-infused treat his little heart desired. From crap you’ve never heard of (because you’re not 12) to the classics: Sugar Pops, Coca Puffs, and everyone’s all-time OG favorite, Lucky Charms—say it with me, “hearts, moons, stars, clovers.” If food were an LSD trip, this red box of rainbows with the funny little man in the electric green top hat would be it. But now, after living through the years of my Swiss Deprivation Phase, I am simultaneously thrilled and guarded by all the variety.
Since I can’t not eat (I get hungry), and eating, last time I checked, was a good thing, what is one supposed to do? Especially if you live year-round in a food environment where every day is a vacation cereal day. Where you can stock up on everything, and you’re expected to buy more than you need (Costco, anyone?). I ponder this as I calmly pay, and the nice bag girl gently sets my carton of eggs on top.
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I no longer buy avocados in Switzerland—99% are spoiled, rockhard or oddly, both.
The name “Schengen” comes from the town in southeastern Luxembourg, where France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands signed the original Schengen Agreement in 1985. The agreement allows for free travel of people and some goods
Kinder, Küche, Kirche, or Children, Kitchen, Church. Kaiser Wilhelm II introduced the term to refer to women's roles in German society, and it continues to apply today.
Thank you for explaining where the word Schengen comes from. I’ve been wondering for years (although not enough to google myself.)
I like the idea of daily shopping. We do it when we are in France. And yes. How many types of toilet paper do we need in the US? On the other hand at my local supermarket in the US, my groceries are bagged by an employee, while I pay so the line moves efficiently but my tomatoes don’t get crushed. In contrast to having to face a smug faced cashier in France sitting with her arms crossed across her chest while I struggle to get my groceries in the plastic sacs she just rudely tossed in my direction. Even the nice ones don’t lift a finger. Maybe they are nicer in Switzerland. 🙄.
Nice piece, Elizabeth! Having lived in Sweden until recently, I can commiserate about the high price of groceries (in fact, people in the US probably can too, now), but it sounds like Switzerland is something else entirely. In Sweden, there are massive supermarkets right on the Norwegian border, and more importantly, there are also liquor stores, so that the Norwegians can come over on the weekend and stock up on everything—because as expensive as Sweden is, Norway is worse. However, there are no police ready to fine you for playing "hide the sausage". 😉