Our New Supermarket

It is not really new in that sense. The building itself has been there many years and originally was a factory belonging to the watch making industry. It was taken over by the largest Swiss supermarket chain, Migros, and turned into a supermarket. Even this became somewhat out of date with modern needs and so it was decided to rebuild this Migros making it bigger and better. There was some trouble with parking space. We have an organisation now in Switzerland that lives in the belief that everyone should travel by bike keeping pollution down to a minimum and putting goods in some sort of small trailing container fixed to the bike. Ridiculous of course, but they had their followers. This lead to the result that you just cannot expand your parking space any more, and a reduction is even necessary. So first problem, we have a new supermarket with less parking spaces. Super: this lead to the fact that the parking has also been rebuilt, a section being propped up on a higher level to reduce the parking. It looks like this.

Sort of white elefant island. You would have thought it would have been made hollow to contain perhaps more space for the bycycles to be parked underneath, but is seems no-one really uses their bike to complete their week-end shopping. Of course no-one is leaving their car at home, and for those like myself that cannot ride a bike anyhow, finding a parking space is becoming very difficult. So now let us enter this new temple of shopping.

Here we are in the vegetable department. The assortment is now twice as large, and the space as well. Today was the first time that my husband and I tackled the week-end shopping. Yes we did lose each other at least twice. At one point it got so bad that I called him on my mobile. He naturally had the voice messenger on, but I soon got a return call and we met again in the middle of the diary produce. We decided that on future shopping excursions in this new supermarket we must have a meeting point, so we settled on the fish department as it is never as crowded as other places. It was really a magical mystery tour today, just ask the assistant if you do not find what you are looking for. They are very helpful, but you just get the feeling that they are not so sure where everything is either. Note the orange signs hanging from the celing declaring that today (yesterday and tomorrow as well) you get 10% reduction on everything you buy. More encouragement for the masses to flock to the opening.

Somehow I did get a bit of a guilt complex. More than half of the world do not know where the next meal is coming from and we are surrounded in abundance with so much, it would be impossible to eat it all. I just wonder how much is thrown away from the goods that cannot be kept. This shows a small part of the vegetable selection. The meat department was not much different and now they have everything separated in all food departments. You can buy biological or normal. I think some countries understand biological produce as being on the farmer's market, sort of letting the vegetables grow together with the bugs and whatever; much more healthy and a nature lesson for the children to go with it. Nothing against biological but much more expensive, and as much as I want to give my family healthy food, my purse just stops at that point.

This new development is enormous. They rebuilt the top floor where the furniture used to be. Now it is just food. In the old shop you were always confronted with customers moving in the opposite direction, and you even spoke to complete strangers, excusing yourself for getting in the way. Now it is completely anonymous and no more confrontations with strange people. You can nicely isolate yourself. We then approached the cash desks which had also doubled in amounts.

So after our first adventure my husband and I were still talking to each other, but both shared a sort of "could not care less" sydrome at the end of the hunting session and were glad to arrive back home. We discovered we needed half an hour more to do what we usually do on Friday. It seems that when the complete renovation is finished there will be a bill of seventy million swiss francs to pay.

Did I mention that Mr. Swiss did say if I wanted to take photos he would wait outside, and I was fixing this memorable day in pictures. As we left this food emporium we noticed that even the skies had been conquered by the new development. What a morning shopping expedition that was.