Arriving to do our weekly shop at Alpha Vita we found both car parks full. Oh no said Bee, supermarket angst! Let’s come back later. Does anyone else suffer from supermarket angst but our family? When it strikes, no matter that you have no food in the house and visitors are coming, you feel overwhelmed and nauseous and have to get the hell out. Of course everyone has it when they are doing the Christmas shop for food, and I had it a lot when I was pregnant, but I was surprised that my children still get it. Toddlers and husbands seem to get it all the time but perhaps that is an allergy to shopping, but women are maybe tougher.
It definitely comes on when the supermarkets are crowded and in those “stack ‘em up, pile ‘em high shops. I think it has something to do with the narrow width between the aisles and the height of the shelves closing me in. But maybe it’s also linked to the air conditioning. Perhaps it’s a form of claustrophobia, or should it be agoraphobia?
Our supermarket is a reasonable size and not normally crowded, so I was surprised to hear Branwen mention angst. We reviewed other supermarkets where it occurred. Definitely in the massive Maxima in the Acropolis shopping mall in Vilnius: just too big and crowded and we could never find anything. Never in the normal-sized Maxima near where we lived. Sometimes in crowded department stores on Oxford St or other capital cities. Come to think of it, it tends to come on when clothes shopping when you can find a lot of things that look nice and you have no money.
To waste some time we went down the road for our regular trip to Marks and Spencer to sneer at the clothes. Word that M&S is a failed retailer selling frumpy clothes that only desperate grannies would buy, has not yet reached Greece, as every municipality has a “boutique” M&S. These sell a range of clothes which seem to be specially “Greeked” up with sequins and other flashy bits, (possibly the recycled Christmas party range) but are in normal sizes for Greek girls who seem to snap them up regardless. Part of the game is to feel the product and guess what it is made of. Barbed wire was one suggestion. A part cashmere offering turned out to have 5%.
In Vilnius we used to play the game of spot the “deficitny” product. At least we didn’t call it that. That was the name for products in the former USSR when they were in short supply (either because they were never made at all) or came in and never made the shops because they were all sold to the salespeople’s friends and relations either out the back door or under the counter. At first in Vilnius, there wasn’t much in the shops and no supermarkets worth the name. As far as westerners were concerned, everything was “deficitny”. People would exchange stories about where it was possible to buy things, but when you got there they were never exactly right. Brown sugar turned out to be the brown crystals for putting in your coffee, not real cane sugar from the West Indies for making gingerbread. And of course you could not get anything remotely ethnic , at least encompassing Indian, Chinese, Mexican or Thai, though some had Georgian, Armenian or Ukrainian goodies. When we went home to the UK we went to the local supermarket, looked at all the new stuff and filled a suitcase with Indian and Chinese sauces and packets.
But after a year or so, Minima, Medea and Maxima developed into real supermarkets and the deficitny list got shorter and shorter. We stopped needing to bring things from home. All the usual things arrived in the shops, at first with Lithuanian instructions for use stuck over the instructions in other languages. Young girls harassed you in the aisles to make sure you understood what a product was for and how to use it. Finally products arrived with suitable languages and I got used to choosing between Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian. Here in Greece it is usually a choice between Greek and Italian so my Italian is improving.
When we left Lithuania the list was down to brown sugar and Greek yoghurt, so it was lucky we came to Greece where both are available. Do we miss anything from Lithuania in Greece? Cottage cheese and sour cream. And a hundred types of pickled herring. But not cepelinai.
