A treat from the university yesterday was a guided group trip to "Lotte Mart", which is Korea's answer to Super Walmart. Try to picture going through a Super Walmart with no norms about passing or blocking aisles, and no compunction against crashing into one another, and you almost have the intensity of a Lotte Mart experience. Still not quite to the militancy level of a Whole Foods trip, granted, and the Korean labels were honestly not much tougher to decipher.
The most poignant moment for me personally was as I was checking out and realized that, not only were my groceries not going into bags, but there were no bags at the checkout at all. Rather, everyone around me was putting their stuff back into their carts and proceeding to a "self service packaging station" that included stacks and stacks of broken down stock boxes and rolls of packaging tape!
I learned a few minutes later that other checkers would offer pretty pink grocery bags, but for a price, and so I guess I did okay, given that I am cheap. The California Pak n Saves have the right idea making you bag your own groceries, but I bet they could go a step further with the stock box model.
Needless to say, despite being served an incorrect burger afterward (call 911!) and a watermelon-related near fatality this morning, the grocery excursion was an acceptable success, and our fridge is full. Sorry that no pictures came from it. They'd have all been blurry anyway.
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