Amazonian Grocery Stores - All That and a Bag of Chips

The grocery stores in Amazonas, Brazil are, well, a bit different than those in the States. Everything in the stores is arranged to look nice. All the products are set up un a specific order. The shelves may be a foot deep, and the bottles of liquid dish soap 3 inches in diameter, but instead of setting the bottles 4 deep, there will be just one big row of dish soap on the very edge of the shelf. As soon as someone buys a bottle, another is immediately put in it’s place so the store continues to look orderly.

A product that is in demand and sells quickly will be hard to find in Amazonas. Since stores cannot keep the product in stock, they just quit ordering it. It’s a hassle to have to keep ordering a product over and over. The store operators are not very happy when people go in and buy the entire stock of one product!

Around the world, chips are packaged in bags with a lot of air so they stay fresh. However, this does not make for convenient stacking on store shelves. To make the chips stack better, the vendors in Amazonas pop all the bags of chips to release the air (which, to North American tastes, makes the chips stale).

The same applies to bags of dog food. The bags ore too bulky, so the vendors stick tersado (machete) holes in the bags to release the air and make the bags more compact. Tom and Sue suggested that the vendors not poke holes in the dog food bags, as it makes the food go bad faster. To this, the vendor replied, “Why do you care? You’re not the one who’s going to be eating this.”

When going on the mission field, be prepared to encounter things that seem “totally illogical” to North American minds. We might think, “Well, that’s a dumb way of doing things, we ought to do it this way…” But that’s just part of moving into another culture, dealing with differences that we can’t change, but it doesn’t make things of other countries wrong, just different!

Originally written by Jessica 8 October 2003