German Supermarkets

Guten Tag everyone,

Today it's all about grocery shopping. First, you can't just take your wallet and go, you'll have to plan first. For example, do not, I repeat, DO NOT leave the house without grocery bags, because not all stores have plastic bags to sell you. And they cost about .30 Canadian and all those .30 add up which could buy you a nice pair of shoes, so...bring your bags.

Also, you cannot always expect parking, so you may have to walk, and if you do walk, then forget the bags; you need a handy dandy Euro covered grocery cart to take with you. Now, they're pricey, but if you like a bargain, like me, then you go to a Troedl Markt (flea market) on a weekend where you can score a gently used cart for €10 which is $15. I have more than got my money's worth from the one I picked up the second week we were here.

Now, of course you will want to go down every aisle to see what kind of food and goodies the Germans have, and you will discover that there are some familiar brands on the shelf like Heinz Ketchup, but expect to pay double the price.

Also, do not be tempted to buy the biggest size because you reason that it's the best bang for your euro, because then you'll get home and find you do not have room in your tiny Euro fridge and will have to eat the whole thing in one day!

You will also discover a bun and pastry machine. Pictures of crispy Euro buns and pastries are pictured above, press a button to select your desired bread, and lo and behold, your bread pops out of the machine. The first time, I bought like 5 different things just for the thrill of watching things slide out of it!

You will also see milk in tetrapac 1L cartons. There are no jugs, no bags and no 2L sizes; remember the small fridges? This milk can sit in your cupboard until you open it, but Steven is very anti-tetrapac milk saying it must be full of preservatives and tastes metallic, so we're a 1L fresh 1.5% milk family. And the 1.5% tastes better than the 10% milk in Ontario, so even though we love cream in our coffee, we've switched to the 1.5%. Whatever Alpen wildflowers and grass those cows are eating, produces the most delicious milk imaginable.

You will also see a lot of packages in written in German and you will have no idea what it says or what's in it, so you will spend a lot of time using up expensive data on your phone to translate everything. Steven once came home with what he thought was a big box of dishwasher tablets, but no, they were washing machine tablets for clothes. Luckily, I translated the box at home before we ruined the dishwasher. Close call folks, but then in Canada, when you see a box of Calgon, and a picture of what looks like a dishwasher at first glance, you think dishes to be cleaned. Of course, if he'd turned the box around, the picture of clothes on the front might have been a clue that this was for clothes.

Anyway, everything is in small packages...EVERYTHING! It's like buying travel sized food. O.k. Just kidding, they're not that small, but still.

So, you're trying new things and loading up your cart which you paid €1 for and then you head for the cashier. Just follow the line of people, and don't worry, the line goes swiftly. Why? Because people are buying relatively small amounts because of their tiny fridges and storage, and also because of the cashiers.

So here's what's up with the cashiers: they're robots, not real robots of course, but automative humans. They are sitting, not standing. There is no eye contact. They start scanning your items: ping, ping, pingpingpingping! Faster and faster and sliding it away to an area the size of a small tray. Now, of course you've been watching all this speed pinging with fascination, not realizing that your stuff is piling up at the end, then teetering off the edge. The cashier will mumble something in German which you take to mean, 'Do something with your stuff!'

Now, of course, if it's your first time, you have no bags, so you look helpless at the cashier and they mumble something again and they throw a few bags at you and add the bag cost, then start pinging madly again. You start bagging your groceries thinking, ok, this is like a 'No Frills', but then start to panic when the cashier is not slowing down.

You think, maybe your cashier has gone off the deep end, so you look around to see if anyone else is noticing this madness. Then you reach the awful realization that ALL the cashiers are madly pinging away and the customers are hurriedly whipping their stuff back in the grocery cart as quickly as possible. No one is bagging anything! Kids were helping, both parents; it was not a one person job!
So, then, you start madly throwing your stuff haphazardly back in your cart and aren't finished when the cashier gives you the total and then you must stop the piling up in the cart and pay. So you get out your wallet and change purse, but then aren't fast enough selecting the right change, so the cashier reaches their fingers into your hand and takes the coins he needs. But then you are stunned and don't even know if he ripped you off and besides that, he touched your hand. WHAT!?! But you don't have a lot of seconds to absorb this because now you have a receipt in front of you and the cashier is madly pinging the items for the next customer and you still haven't got your stuff off the tiny tray sized area which is now being filled with groceries from the next person! I swear, I had a flashback to the 'I Love Lucy Show' where Lucy and Ethel are wrapping chocolates on a conveyer belt and can't keep up!

It's at this point that you break out into a sweat and literally throw the rest of your stuff in the cart and wheel it away feeling dazed. You notice that there are tables set up away from the cashiers and this is where shoppers are bagging their groceries. You go there too and sort your stuff and wonder, 'What just happened?'

But it's not over yet because you notice that people are taking their receipts and scanning them in front of a machine with a card. You look around and find new cards, then ask the person at the information desk in broken German English what to do. You will find that they don't speak a lick of English and because you uttered some German to them will assume you are an expert and assume you know exactly what they said...but you don't. It's at this point that looking puzzled will help you because they will go to the machine and do it all for you except since THEY did it all, you will have no clue what to do next time and will have to ask again. Then, and only then, will you wheel your Euro cart away and ponder everything.

And that was my first grocery shopping experience in Germany at a supermarket, swear...to...God.