Korea 2011: Shopping at a supermarket

There are two large equivalents to PnP in Korea.  The first is Home Plus, the second is Lotte.  Dani uses Home Plus.  Here are some pictures of the goods on sale:

Salad greens lying in a bed of cooled steam to keep them fresh

A dragon fruit - I didn't get to try one of these

Seaweed - a whole aisle full of different brands and flavours

Packaged seafood of all shapes and sizes

Dried seafood - this are dried shrimps

The seafood deli - again a multitude of squidgy things

Octopus

Octopus tentacles

Shellfish in a myriad of shapes and sizes

Iced Coffee

I thought that the iced coffee was rare.  Wrong!  For an historically tea drinking nation who are renowned for their green tea, they have most certainly embraced coffee!

The vegetable oil aisle - a myriad of brands and flavours

The soy sauce aisle - a myriad of brands and flavours

And now for the pet section.  I wasn't thrilled about some of these:

Water turtles

Hermit Crabs

Pet fish - very pretty colours

A hedgehog

And now for supermarket promotions.  This was not rare.  We saw it all over the place:

Dressed for the part

 Now this was infinitely practical:

Packaging one's groceries

One pays and tips one purchases back into a trolley.  Then one goes to an out of the way counter where all the boxes in which groceries have been delivered have been flattened.  One then re-assembles a box and tapes it together, and puts one's groceries into that.  This is so simple and so basic I simply cannot understand why it is not internationally practised.  One has the option of purchasing a grocery bag, much like we do.  Otherwise, one can re-use a box which here in ZA would be put straight into the recycling system.  One then uses the box and guess what?  One then puts it into the recycling system.  Two uses instead of one.  How practical is that?

There is one other thing that I simply have to add here.  The bags, be they tiny or huge may come with handles like ours, or may not - as in the case of rubbish bags.  What ALL bags whether they have handles or not have are two extra little squares which protrude from the bag.  These are used for ties when one recycles stuff.  This is simply SO thoughtful.  How many times have you filled a bag to overflowing and huffed and puffed to make 'ears' in order to tie the bag up?  Not required in Korea - the ears are provided by default.  Excuse me for being naive.  Somewhere billions of bags are being churned out by a machine.  How hard would it be to have the machine churn out the ears on the bag?  So simple, so thoughtful, so effective - the Korean way.