Grocery Shopping

So the nearest grocery store to me is called Jusco, and it has a decent selection of goods. All of the basics, for the Japanese that is, but really it has a pretty good selection of goods. So this morning I watched a cool little video online about grocery baggers, and so I will describe how the system works in Japan.

In Jusco, you walk up to the register, where you have a little basket of what you plan to purchase, shopping carts and the like are of course available as well, but mostly everyone just uses the little baskets. Once at the register, the clerk scans all of the items, while placing them into another basket.

Once she is done, she asks if you would like to purchase any bags (5 yen a pop). And while this is totally an option, everyone just brings their own bags to use so they don't have to pay, I like to use my backpack. So now that you've payed and you have your basket full of groceries, what happens next? There are large table at the end of the each of the check out lines that everyone just huddles around, while they pack their own bags. Pretty different from the system depicted in this video:

http://campbellbrown.blogs.cnn.com/2009/11/20/best-grocery-baggers-compete/

I must admit that I prefer this system to the American one. It is nice having someone do the work for you, but at the same time that requires the time and space for that person to work there, while they could be doing something else. Thus the number of check out lines in Jusco is around 25 or so I think, and sometimes the 1-10 lines will have 2 clerks per line to make things go even faster.

Now I think that if you were in an American grocery store and you asked someone to pack their own bags, they would probably be appalled at the idea. But I also think that Americans tend to purchase much much more when they go to the grocery store. If you have more space to store things (2 fridges + 2 freezers etc) then you can 'stock up' which means less trips to the grocery store. This is definitely a necessity if the nearest grocery store is 20-30 minutes. However I think it's safe to assume that most Japanese do not have 2 freezers and 2 fridges, and thus they must go grocery shopping much more frequently, however during each trip they only purchase a small amount of goods.

This is definitely a result of the density of Japan. You have 20-30 thousand people living within 5-10 square blocks of the same grocery store, and they obviously won't have the same storage space as Americans so stocking up really isn't an option.

I would also like to ad courtesy of my girlfriend, that in Germany, the only way to get a shopping cart is to pay for one. So you drop a euro into the machine and it releases a cart for you. The catch is, if you put the cart back into the machine when you are done, it gives you your euro back. This really needs to be implemented into American grocery stores. Seeing some poor chap going around the parking lot wrangling in the shopping carts is pretty useless in my opinion.