Ordinary Gweilo

Only this morning I was wondering how many ways there are that I hate Hong Kong supermarkets.  This thought was prompted by the discovery that the most of the blueberries I bought a few days now seem to become rotten.  Would it really be so difficult to put “sell by” and “eat by” dates on the packaging?

Then I went to one of the nearby Wellcome supermarkets and things got worse.  I suppose I should have been alerted to what was going on by the army of old people outside the shop and the woman with 10 bottles of cooking oil in her shopping trolley.  Yes, that’s right, it’s 10% off everything day.  Why do they do this to me?  I probably visit this shop less than once a month, normally to buy a couple of things for my lunch, and I want to be in and out fast.  No chance of that today, just the same as back in May when I previously wrote about it – and once again I only realized this after wasting 5 minutes selecting what I wanted to buy.  

At least the crazy reductions at Park’n’Shop are fairly harmless, but unfortunately, there isn’t much choice near where I work.  It’s one of oddities of Hong Kong that you often find areas where all the supermarkets seem to be run by one or the other of the big two, and here there are three Wellcomes and no sign of Park’n’Shop.  Where I live it’s the other way round.

Anyway, do promotions like this really help?  The risk is that you drive customers like me away (probably no great loss) and encourage people with more time to buy in bulk and then wait until then next 10% off day.  I remember about 10 years ago when the department store chain Debenhams used to have maybe 3 or 4 big sales each year, and as a result of this hardly sold anything the rest of the year because customers could easily wait till the next sale came round.  I think the management did eventually realize that this was not a smart strategy.     

Of course, walking around a busy supermarket is made even more unpleasant because they clog up the aisles with cardboard boxes full of stuff they are promoting.  Again, I really wonder whether this helps them but, hey, maybe they get enough money from the suppliers for displaying their products for it to be worthwhile.