bad, bad shopping

December 10th, 2006

Shopping in this country is so difficult that I might as well have a separate category for it on the blog. From food, to stationary, to bikes, to plants, to decor, to just about everything. Clothing seems to be decent, but that's an exception. So it's not without a certain skepticism I approached the first stab at Christmas gifts. Indeed the only thing I ended up buying was batteries on sale at Media Markt. Christmas gifts are tricky to begin with, cause there are no rules. Although I enjoy actually getting them and giving them, I don't enjoy the shopping process, wandering around trying to brainstorm. I mean Trondheim is a small town, it makes shopping hard. But Utrecht is the same kind of place, just that all the articles seem to be randomly spread and the kind of things I expect to find are not to be seen anywhere. I cruised around V&D and found their stationary department, which is pretty pathetic. I'm gonna make a note of getting stationary in Poland, where the culture for it is rich.

What you will find here is a bunch of stores very rarely found in Norway. Stores that have no defined role, they just sell completely random crap. Kruidvat is a chemist, but on the side they sell candy, cosmetics, photo equipment, CDs/DVDs, cheap clothing, children's toys, non-prescription drugs, and a bunch of things you will find there only once (like a tennis racket) by chance. This may sound disorganized, but HEMA seems to have no defined role at all, in there it's all random. This means if you want something in particular, you end up wandering through these stores on the off chance that they have what you need (which never seems to be the case). And it's not brand stores either, for clothes and media you know exactly where to go, but these "do you feel lucky?" stores make it impossible to know where to go for say a mirror, or a thermometer.

And I'm not the only one to think shopping here is awful, it seems to be a fairly well established claim.

:: random entries in this category ::

1 Responses to "bad, bad shopping"

  1. erik says:

    It's very specific yeah. I have no issues with it cause I grew up here.

    HEMA is a department store. Bijenkorf is basically the Dutch Marks & Spencer, then there's V&D which is kinda in between and HEMA closes the ranks. It's a bit of a trashy place but you can get all sorts of cheap stuff there.

    Kruidvat is just madness. Like Zeeman. I also hate stores like Expo