Supermarket

19 May 2007

I mentioned earlier that we shopped for household items during our first weekend at the departments stores and found these expensive. Well, we discovered that there are chain discount supermarkets which are cheaper but still around twice the cost in Manila.

The first store we went to was Lotte Mart. It has two floors; first floor would be where you would find the food items and the second floor is for non-food items. Reminds you a bit of SM Hypermart. Now, Lotte is a familiar name not only in retail but as a manufacturer of many consumer items also, ala San Miguel. It has around twenty stores in the city alone. So we thought this was the biggest and cheapest one. However, we were surprised to find that it ranked just third; with the largest being E Mart. The owners of E Mart initially were in a joint venture with Costco to establish the first discount store in 1994. They eventually parted ways but became better in appealing to Korean shoppers. In fact, E Mart is now considered as the model in discount retailing in Korea. Walmart made a mistake in sticking to their own style of operating and failed after a few years (they eventually sold their stores to E Mart). E Mart has over a hundred stores now in Korea.

We went to the store nearest to us on Sunday and found the selection more varied but the prices are almost similar. The set-up is also the same. Although it is a discount store, they sell in pieces or if in bulk, the quantities are small. In addition, there is a large fresh produce section wherein they offer a number of sampling, especially of cooked items (remember I mentioned in my first posting that Koreans prefer to buy cooked food because they do not like to bother to cook at home). Of course, there is always a food court beside the supermarket just in case one does not get full just eating the samples. In addition, you have to bring your own shopping bag in case you don't want to pay for them from the store.

Our lesson this week is to persevere and do some research so that eventually we will come up with a better alternative.