Mall Shopping – a nation’s favourite sport

Katong Mall/Parkway Parade is the big mall along the east coast. We’d wandered along n the weekend to see what was what and where we could get our groceries from. Don’t get me wrong, there’s much shopping to be got from wet markets and the endless fruit shops that have accumulated around Still Road and East Coast Road. I like to help the little guy, the one-man-band, so I do hope to purchase most of my fresh goods from these stalls, however every now and again you just need to go big.

There’s two options at Parkway; Cold Storage and Giant. Cold Storage, unlike it’s name suggests, is not for frozen foods, but is a normal store. A normal store except that it carries every expats smallest wish for food from the homeland; for me there’s tea from Marks & Spencers, Dorset muesli, Twisties, Cheezels. “Just like home” should be their tag line. Obviously this comes with an expat price too, so beware, once in a while is OK.

The second option is Giant, now that does live up to its name, it’s massive. Narrow aisles mean you can cram in more, and cram they do. The shelves are a real-life pop art wall of blocked colour as cereal boxes, tins and bottles of sauce overload your vision with symbols and bright labels whilst yours ears are subjected to 1950s love songs. Just like any other supermarket the world over, you enter to the fresh fruit and vegetable section; everything here is FRESH, this is FRESH shop (thanks Eddie Izzard)!

You look along the aisles to see fruit, veg, meat, fish, breads, tins, jars, boxes, buckets, bags, packets and then TVs, radios, clothes, home furnishings, outdoor tables, EVERYTHING is here. It’s the Vegas of supermarkets.

It’s all going so well, there are so many brands at very reasonable prices, but which one is best? Which one is cheapest? Why are three packets of almonds from three different almond suppliers sized in three different weights? That just makes the mathematics harder to calculate price per 100g. I don’t need this on a Sunday morning.

Finally, 45 minutes later, (which I was pretty chuffed with, given the amount of stuff we have crammed into our trolley on this our first shop in the new place) we are loaded to busting with multi-packs of tissues and toilet roll, vats of cleaning products, larder spices and sauces, rice, pasta, noodles; the basics. Serious shopping and we head to the checkouts, checkouts that stretch for about 300m along the entire shop front. We pick at random aisle 36. Never pick 36 on a roulette wheel. It’s a bad number, here’s why.

It took us a further 45 minutes to line up (we were 4th in line), pack and pay. That’s as long as our shopping excursion itself. We found that the Giant staff (in that they are employees of the corporation called Giant, not that they work for a giant nor indeed are they gigantic humans) have an orderly, rigid, don’t-be-messed-with approach to packing bags. Certain products live together and therefore get packed together.

You don’t get a multi-cultural shopping bag in multi-cultural Singapore.

No, you get three items in a non-biodegradable plastic bag which is then placed inside your reusable bag like a polluting version of Russian dolls.

Faced with our large collection of reusable heavy duty bags from various supermarkets in various countries there was some confusion and a little hesitation from the poor girl as we insisted she just throw everything in together. Gosh, it took so LONG! Instead of scanning each product as it reached her, she was cherry-picking along the length of the conveyor belt to select like-products before placing them in the bags. Arrrgh!! Infuriating! We then faced a 15 minute line up for a taxi. Good job we had no frozen products.

So, be warned, sort your purchases wisely and take your recycling bags. Singapore recently held a six week long trial for one day a week where customers were required to use their own bags. They have now stopped that and are back to plastic. Sigh.

Orchard Road on the other hand is a mecca of shopping, if Giant is like Vegas, then Orchard Road is like Paris; excess but with the glitz and glamour in equal amount. A new mall has been built recently seemingly just for the luxury brands; Luis Vuitton, Prada, Armani, Gucci, D&G, Rolex…yadda yadda yadda and the list goes on until you’re in debt to your extended lash eyeballs. If shopping is a national sport, then this is the Singapore Olympic Stadium for the 21st century. It deserves its own blog entry.