US vs. Swiss Grocery Shopping: A Culture Clash - So Frickin' Mini

Hey, Donna, do you have 10 minutes to talk about grocery stores?

Oh, my God, I love grocery stores.

Yes, please.

What are we talking about?

It's the first thing I do ever, anytime I visit any country.

I'm like, let's go to the supermarket.

I.

Okay, so that's not what we're going to talk about.

I mean, I love that too.

It's like how.

Yeah.

Trying all the different foods, but no.

Okay, so that's another mini right there.

No, what I want to talk about.

And it kind of of highlighted it the other day.

So right now when we're recording this, the World cup is going on and there's a lot of Europeans over in the US and they're talking about how much, how the quantities of food that are on the shelf and not just the variety of food, but the package sizes of food.

And like, even a normal grocery store, it feels like a bulk purchasing store.

Not like Costco.

Costco, we all know is a bulk purchasing store, but even regular stores, the packaging sizes are amazing.

And there was actually a US Person who was commenting that the Europeans were commenting on this.

And the American person was like, yeah, but you know, we only go shopping once a month, so we gotta buy it all.

Yeah.

And I went to the comment section like, immediately.

And the Europeans are like, fresh food does not stay good for a month.

Well, it kind of doesn't.

America.

I don't know how, I don't want to know how.

And immediately I'm like, I have to talk to Donna about this because this is, and we, we, we, we talked a little bit like, well, how do we want to approach this?

It really has to be about the behavior, the living style between the US and we're going to stick with Switzerland because that's where we live.

Yeah.

And yeah.

So first of all, I want to know how many times a week do you go to the grocery store?

I'll go once, big one and, and probably once to twice more to fill in the blanks.

So grab a yokel.

Take your car.

Or do you drive or do you walk?

It depends.

Sometimes I'll walk to the nearest farm and supermarket, the smaller one.

If I go for a big shopping, I'll take the car to just a bigger supermarket.

And again, for our US Listeners, the biggest supermarket that I have around me is probably the smallest one that you've ever entered in the U.S. i think.

Yeah, yeah.

But, yeah, so I, My grocery store is like a four minute walk.

Yeah, less, less than four minutes away.

And we actually call that grocery store our Second pantry and our second refrigerator.

That's how we think of it.

Yeah.

So I go to the grocery store almost every other day to get a fresh bread for my husband who eats bread.

Like it's, you know, cause he's a German and, and then like any.

And okay, so this brings us to the.

The first point is I don't have room in.

I got a brand new refrigerator and it is bigger than my last refrigerator and I still don't have enough room to do any kind of bulk shopping for two people in this refrigerator.

There's no way the refrigerator.

No.

So we have to visually explain this to our listeners.

Our freezer within the fridge is a shoe box size.

I am not exaggerating.

Let's say it's a very, it's much big.

Like it's a.

Maybe it's like a boot box.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's not a small box, but it is literally that size.

So you can put in very little.

Some people don't even use it because it's so useless.

I only have like herbs in there, like little bags of, of chopped up herbs.

That's all I keep in there in one box for some ice cubes.

Yeah.

So it's literally, it's useless.

And then the refrigerator is probably, I would say a third size of the, let's say normal American sized refrigerators.

I know how you can tell.

So the.

For Americans, the standard kind of Swiss refrigerator is about the same size as in an rv.

Yes, exactly.

That's about the size.

Yeah.

So it's very, very small.

It might not even be your height because it's elevated.

So it's, it's maybe your height roughly.

Not even.

No, the, the freezer width is the size of your face.

That's it.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so, but, but the point is, is that like if I want, I can't have, I can't have multiple things in there and for example, have leftovers or prep my food.

I love watching food prep videos.

Right.

I can't food prep so much because there's no place to put it.

Plus, you know, everything else that you need to stick into your refrigerator on a normal basis.

Exactly.

So we go.

So, so the behavior part of the shopping is I go when I need it.

I go to the quote unquote big grocery store and the next village over, which is about our next town over, which is about five kilometers away or three miles away.

And that's when I take my car.

And then I also like bulk buy my milk at that point because I'm not going to haul back milk or beer or anything from the little grocery store down here because I'm walking.

Yeah.

Down.

Yeah.

But there's also something else to, to consider here that I think maybe our American listeners wouldn't necessarily understand is that the bread in Switzerland will only last you a day, maybe two.

It's not, there's no bread that will last more than like three days even if it's prepackaged.

The vegetables and the, the American version of bread does.

It's called toast here.

But it's the, like the white bread,.

They don't even dare to call it bread.

Yeah, no, it's called toast.

Toast.

Yeah, that's true.

And then also vegetable.

I mean like I remember visiting my parents in the US and my mom bought in Costco, bought like a 5 kilo box of organic strawberries and blueberries and those stayed perfectly beautiful for a month.

And I was like, this is not, this is not organic.

It cannot be organic.

And it's not even, I don't know, it's not real.

I don't know what it is.

It's like robot strawberries.

Like strawberries here will go bad within three days.

So.

And that's the real food.

That's actually.

So I appreciate that there, there's a lot more regulation around food in Switzerland and I think that's why the scarcity is also a little bit different or.

Scarcity.

Yeah.

The length that a food will stay.

Shelf life is I think the shelf life.

Exactly.

So yeah, yeah.

But that to say we have a Costco now within driving distance of my house in France.

And actually I didn't understand or didn't know until that opened last fall that there's Costco's elsewhere in Europe.

But the surprising thing is this is not really the point of this conversation is when you look at where that food is coming from.

None of the food in Costco is coming from the US it's all European based.

And that's a whole nother topic about the level of regulation, regulation in the food.

So food that's coming to my co op here or at my Costco here in France is coming from Spain or the UK or you know, like that's the generation of this food.

And you know, when I go to Costco I really have to think where am I going to put this?

Like, and you have a big kitchen, you have numerous refrigerators.

So again we have another freezer.

Yeah, we have a whole nother freezer that is always full somehow.

How does that sense?

The freezers are like, like the loaves and the fishes, man.

I mean, they just keep generating and anyway.

But yeah, so like, if I want to buy guacamole there, which I thought was really, really good, I'm like, okay, can I freeze it?

Because I'm not going to be able to fit it in my refrigerator and I can barely fit it in my freezer.

So.

So anyway, the point was to say, like, we each, on each side of the pond, are always surprised at the behavior and culture behind grocery shopping.

And I just wanted to highlight that because it's.

It.

It actually speaks more to the culture than.

You know what I mean?

Like.

Like, I don't know.

I'm sure there's a behavior scientist who has done a study on how grocery shopping culture equates to other cultural things in a.

In a specific group forming that.

So to me, it's like.

Well, but it's like driving culture in the U.S. bigger houses, more refrigerators, more freezers, space.

Right.

So in the US they have more space over here in Europe, in Switzerland, we don't have as much space.

So therefore the.

It's this space base constraint.

Yeah.

And I think, although, why does the food last so long in the U.S. i don't know.

So scared.

But there was like, probably 15 different things we could talk about with grocery stores when I was doing the research for this.

So dear listener, if you want to hear most more about grocery stores or if you want to do I.

One was like a price comparison I'd like to do with some basics because all these people go on to videos and they show how expensive it is in the Swiss grocery stores, which it is.

It is expensive here.

Well, comparatively, the US Is getting more expensive.

So, yeah, I don't think it's as expensive as this anyway, but there's a lot of different topics we could talk about with Swiss grocery stores and Swiss eating.

So thank you, Donna, for spending the last 10 minutes with me talking about this.

Was it only 10 minutes?

It felt like longer.

I was like, I don't know, it.

Might have been longer.

I forgot to look at the time.

We'll figure anyway.

All right, thanks, Donna.

Bye.