Entering the store, you're immediately dropped into the produce aisle in the front of the store -- well, once you pass the promotional pallets and cell phone store. The Mobile Shop actually looks pretty nice, especially compared to what stores like Walmart or Fred Meyer have!
Oh no, a prominently placed cell phone store! Hopefully the employees don't run out of the shop and try to flag down customers hoping to get them to switch phone companies like they do at American malls!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of which, this is a rant-worthy topic. HEB stores in Houston are now allowing (or being paid to allow this more specifically) phone and electricity provider companies to set up at the front of their stores and try to get people to switch providers. They'll try to talk to you even if you give them the stink eye as they approach. It is really quite annoying! I've seen this a few times at a couple of Kroger locations as well, but usually the people at Kroger don't talk to you if you give them an evil look so they aren't as annoying. Still, it is a shame stores are reducing themselves to such tactics! Fortunately, I've never seen any of this at Randall's or Food Town. All the more reason to shop at those stores I suppose.
Hey, real floors at a warehouse store! I'm not sure why I'm impressed by that. The flooring here doesn't look great (still better than concrete!) and Wal-Mart Supercenters used to have tiles like this before they ripped them out in recent times. Oh well.
The last Loblaw store I went to (I've been to a few in Canada) was this L'intermarché franchise store in Quebec City. That was obviously a small, but pretty nice, store, but I'm sure this store will be an entirely different experience! Link: https://maps.app.goo.gl/E9ZEyLMmyGL3rGrv6
Ha! I certainly didn't have any issues with cell phone stores in Canada -- and I haven't really had issues in the US either. I'm not a very approachable person!
DeleteWow, that does sound annoying! I've never seen anything like that around here. It feels utterly foreign to me that there would be electricity companies competing for your business like that! Around here (and I believe pretty much everywhere except Texas), electric service is run either by the government (everywhere I've ever lived), a public utility district (mostly rural areas), or a private company running as a regulated monopoly (mostly the Seattle suburbs with PSE). I don't understand Texas's system one bit, especially as it's the same power lines that you're connected to regardless of what company you go with (unlike with, say, internet or TV service, where each company has their own separate lines).
The vinyl flooring here looks pretty bad to be honest, but I'm sure it's still better than whatever concrete slab there is under it -- I'm pretty sure this building far predates Real Canadian Superstore (I'll talk more about that later), and considering how bad concrete slabs tend to look at stores that are just a few decades old, I'm sure this would look terrible!
Yeah, this is a very different sort of place to that! That's a very small, upscale store (looking more like what I'd expect to see in Europe), whereas this is a huge, lower-end sort of store (though still not exactly a discount store like Walmart).
Ha, trust me, you're not the only one who finds the Texas deregulated power retail system to be bizarre...to say the very least. The way it usually works is that the various companies will offer new customers a special price for 12-24 months, but if you don't switch after that contract, the prices will jump significantly so we have to be sure to stay on top of that. There is a lot of advertising for power plans around here including what we're unfortunately seeing at supermarkets. Many studies show that the public isn't saving money through this system, but I guess that should have been pretty obvious!
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