And now I will be known as the girl who abandoned her groceries
It’s a Monday evening, and as is the custom in France, all the small grocery stores, bakeries, and butcher shops are closed for the day. My apartment’s minuscule refrigerator – approximately the size of a picnic cooler and therefore unable to hold much more than one meal’s ingredients at a time – is empty, which leaves me with no choice but to roam the distinctly cheese-scented isles of the local Carrefour supermarket in search of dinner.
The French supermarket is something of an oddity compared to its North American counterpart. To start with, it’s not particularly large, and half of the store appears to be dedicated to wine, while another substantial chunk is devoted entirely to cheese and yogurt. Then there’s the fact that refrigeration seems to be considered unimportant: Eggs and milk are stacked on shelves next to the bread, while all the fruits and vegetables languish in baskets in the middle of the store, drooping dejectedly.
The supermarket is clearly a second-class citizen here. Any true Parisian is used to buying their produce from the outdoor markets that pop up in various locations around the city throughout the week, getting meat from the boucherie or charcuterie, and ducking into the fromagerie to select the night’s cheese plate with a still-warm baguette from the boulangerie next door poking out of their bag. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and a Monday evening with an empty refrigerator certainly qualifies as a cause for desperation.
It’s at this time that I become acquainted with an entirely new way of purchasing vegetables. Back home, I’m used to dropping them into plastic bags and later slinging them casually onto the conveyer belt at the checkout, where the cashier always seems to know exactly what’s contained within each bag and how much it should cost. But here? Well, you weigh and label it all on your own, using a small scale with a button for every single type of produce in the store and a slot that spits out a little label for your correctly categorized, self-weighed bag of vegetables.
Of course, there are no signs explaining this to disoriented customers like me. The only way to learn the customs of the French supermarket is through trial and error, with an emphasis on error. And so I unload a pile of produce in front of the cashier, greet her with an almost embarrassingly cheerful-sounding bonjour – and am acknowledged with a bag of onions swinging from her hand and a rapid-fire stream of French in a decidedly condescending tone. While my brain lurches into action and starts cobbling together a response of some sort, I can see the expressions on the faces of everyone in line behind me start to change. Several people roll their eyes, one woman turns and mutters something to the man behind her (her vegetables, no doubt, have all been weighed and neatly labelled), and the cashier just stares at me, eyes slightly narrowed.
I’m all set to launch into an attempt at an explanation when suddenly, I change my strategy. I shrug my shoulders as I mumble a hasty au revour, then flee empty-handed from the store. A few minutes later, I’ve trudged down the street to Franprix, where I work my way through my grocery list for the second time in a row, obsessively weighing and labelling every single fruit and vegetable. And when I finally plunk my groceries down in front of the cashier and receive a relatively cheerful greeting in return, I feel disproportionately triumphant, as though I’ve just aced some sort of exceedingly difficult exam.
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