Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Getting Up to Speed with the Modern World
When I lived in convenience-land Vienna, where stores aren't open on Sunday or past 5 on Saturday evening - any store, I often wondered what it would be like to live in a place again where there was convenience and that oh-so-scary-idea, customer service.
I don't think I ever got used to the concept that you must buy the bags in which you carry your groceries home. That just seems harsh, cruel, and a very difficult decision to make when you have no idea how many bags you would need to carry home food enough for breakfast lunch and dinner for Saturday and Sunday. Plus drinks. Now let me remind you that its Saturday morning and you haven't had any coffee. 1 bag? 4? But I have only two hands! You can get around this by bringing your own carrying devices, which I never had to do before in my life. There's cars in my hometown, right? Cars with trunks. Awesome!
And someone tell me what is the purpose of essentially loaning your grocery cart a euro or two just so you can use it for the duration of your swirl around the store? Surely, those carts cost more than 2 whole euros, and in a place like Austria where theft is only done to bicycles, the deposit for the pleasure of convenience of a wheeled cart is some kind of leftover from the war, or after the war. Right? (I found that to be a common excuse for arcane or strange mannerisms, so I'm sure it fits here.) --- Err maybe that was a common excuse that I made up and used, but it applies probably so let it fly, ok?
Being such a small country with little agriculture land, its not far fetched to imagine that fruit and vegetable selection would be rather limited, or just really expensive, what with the need for all those imports - from non EU countries usually. Except it was really only just limited. Insult to injury, you could only buy a small collection of fruit and veg in bulk. Like garlic. Who needs 4 globes of garlic at once? Vampires - they're not real. You don't need this much garlic. And shallots. Who always needs 20 shallots? You want one potato? NO! You must have a whole giant bag. You only need one onion in the next month? Too bad! You'll have a whole bag of them rotting in your kitchen if you don't use them all in the next week.
Oh and also, OH MY GOD, fresh fruit and vegetables, HA! FRESH my ass! Strawberries fresh from the store often start molding about 20 minutes after they leave the store. On the way home, in the middle of being put in the fridge, whatever. Wherever they happen to be at the time, they go wrong. Those long trips of import from all those other countries not really nearby must be really long! Exceptionally long. Long enough so that you can't really buy any fruit unless you plan to eat it on the way home, unless, of course, you want to throw it out when you walk in the door. It completely reverses the meaning to never shop hungry. You MUST shop hungry or you'll just be wasting food.
So now that I've panned that place I used to live on a number of levels, none of which covers that ever-elusive topic of customer service, let me explain what brought this up.
A delivery. Of groceries. That I placed online. And they took a credit card as payment! Get THAT Austria!
Next entry: solar powered ferret fans or, perhaps, the totally abysmal state of ant housings and over spreading of fungus around domestic ant colonies
I don't think I ever got used to the concept that you must buy the bags in which you carry your groceries home. That just seems harsh, cruel, and a very difficult decision to make when you have no idea how many bags you would need to carry home food enough for breakfast lunch and dinner for Saturday and Sunday. Plus drinks. Now let me remind you that its Saturday morning and you haven't had any coffee. 1 bag? 4? But I have only two hands! You can get around this by bringing your own carrying devices, which I never had to do before in my life. There's cars in my hometown, right? Cars with trunks. Awesome!
And someone tell me what is the purpose of essentially loaning your grocery cart a euro or two just so you can use it for the duration of your swirl around the store? Surely, those carts cost more than 2 whole euros, and in a place like Austria where theft is only done to bicycles, the deposit for the pleasure of convenience of a wheeled cart is some kind of leftover from the war, or after the war. Right? (I found that to be a common excuse for arcane or strange mannerisms, so I'm sure it fits here.) --- Err maybe that was a common excuse that I made up and used, but it applies probably so let it fly, ok?
Being such a small country with little agriculture land, its not far fetched to imagine that fruit and vegetable selection would be rather limited, or just really expensive, what with the need for all those imports - from non EU countries usually. Except it was really only just limited. Insult to injury, you could only buy a small collection of fruit and veg in bulk. Like garlic. Who needs 4 globes of garlic at once? Vampires - they're not real. You don't need this much garlic. And shallots. Who always needs 20 shallots? You want one potato? NO! You must have a whole giant bag. You only need one onion in the next month? Too bad! You'll have a whole bag of them rotting in your kitchen if you don't use them all in the next week.
Oh and also, OH MY GOD, fresh fruit and vegetables, HA! FRESH my ass! Strawberries fresh from the store often start molding about 20 minutes after they leave the store. On the way home, in the middle of being put in the fridge, whatever. Wherever they happen to be at the time, they go wrong. Those long trips of import from all those other countries not really nearby must be really long! Exceptionally long. Long enough so that you can't really buy any fruit unless you plan to eat it on the way home, unless, of course, you want to throw it out when you walk in the door. It completely reverses the meaning to never shop hungry. You MUST shop hungry or you'll just be wasting food.
So now that I've panned that place I used to live on a number of levels, none of which covers that ever-elusive topic of customer service, let me explain what brought this up.
A delivery. Of groceries. That I placed online. And they took a credit card as payment! Get THAT Austria!
Next entry: solar powered ferret fans or, perhaps, the totally abysmal state of ant housings and over spreading of fungus around domestic ant colonies
notes:
...and concerning an explanation for the whole shopping cart-, fruit- and customer service thing in Austria...
I TOTALLY would but unfortunately don't have time right now.
So let's wait for Tobe. Tobe? Where is Tobe when you need him?
I TOTALLY would but unfortunately don't have time right now.
So let's wait for Tobe. Tobe? Where is Tobe when you need him?
But I already have the explanation about the customer service! I'll wait for Tobe for the rest, though. Let's see if he can refute the postwar theory!
You're right Kirs. And it's not ever going to stop unless somebody removes all that overseas-nonsense and reestablishes proper grocery shops. until it's bad shopping mall and supermarket copies for us poor communists.
We have gluehwein, tho.
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We have gluehwein, tho.
# noted by 
: 4:50 PM
: 4:50 PM
