A guide to Korean supermarkets

I'm not a shopping enthusiast, to say the least. But I must admit shopping is more fun abroad because you get to see a lot of different products. So I may be a little less reluctant to go grocery shopping in Korea than in France, although to be honest I'd still rather be going somewhere else like here or here.

There are a few big supermarket chains in Korea, like Lotte Mart, Homeplus and E-mart, and smaller ones like Top Mart or Sunny Mart to name but two. Among the big ones, E-mart is the one I know best because we used to go there in Yangsan, and there's also one down the street in Haeundae.

Emart in Haeundae

Our E-mart is open  Monday through Saturday from 10 am to 11 pm, and every other Sunday. This is pretty convenient, and a little new to me, as in France, most supermarkets open earlier in the morning and close earlier in the evening. Very few are open on Sundays (grocery shopping at  2am like in the US would be unthinkable in my country).

In this post, I'll mostly focus on the food section , because that is where I can see the biggest differences with France. Let's start with fruit. My impression is that there is a large choice of fruit in Korean stores. I mean there are many different kinds of fruit, but they often come in only one or two varieties. For instance, I'm an apple eater, and in France I would expect four or five different varieties of apples at the grocery store. In the Korean stores I have visited, I've always found only one variety of apple ("Fuji apples" if wikipedia is to be believed). On the plus side you can find strawberries almost all year round, and they're very tasty. 

Speaking of taste, it's interesting that Korea has pears and grapes that taste quite different from I'm used to. They look familiar but they taste like it's an entirely different kind of fruit.

When you buy vegetables or fruit,  you may have to weigh them before checking out, but sometimes that is not necessary. So I'm never really sure what to do, but usually one  shop employee manages to make me understand what I should do, even if they don't speak English.

One big problem in my opinion is that fruit is quite expensive here. It was a real shock to me the first time I saw I could buy 5 apples for 7,000 won (€5,5, or $6). It's also striking to see that most fruit is wrapped in plastic. There actually seems to be plastic everywhere!

Plastic

A lot of plastic...

Korea seems to have become aware of the problem, though. New laws have been passed to ban or restrict the use of plastic items and bags, but it will take a little time to change customers' habits I guess.

This sign asks customers to use plastic bags responsibly

In almost any aisle at the supermarket, you'll run into people offering something to taste or some kind of discount on a product. In a way it's good because you can have a whole meal for free by simply trying everything you're offered. By the way there's often a Food Court or food booth inside the supermarket if you really are hungry (again, this wouldn't suprise Americans, but we don't have that in my country).

Food booth

But all these people also make the place quite noisy, especially when some of them have microphones, and to crown it all there may also be background music or TVs playing commercials. So it can get pretty loud and cacophonous.

쫄깃한버섯!

But at least, listening to them can help you learn words like 버섯 ("mushroom") and 쫄깃 ("chewy"), which I learned from that one guy who kept repeating "쫄깃한버섯!" Or you can learn the name of fruits from one of the commercials I've just mentioned:

Catchy, isn't it?
 
And of course, this is Korea, so you'll find so many varieties of Kimchi, but also so many kinds of tofu. That's why last time Her asked me to "buy some tofu" I had to send a text message asking her to be a little more specific. 

Needless to say that the noodle section is quite impressive. I'll write a post about Korean ramen noodles soon.

The seafood section is well stocked too, with live animals in fishtanks, which always makes me feel a little uncomfortable. And yet this one looks happy, but appearances can be deceptive.

As I already wrote on this blog, everything goes pretty fast in Korea. So at the supermarket, you can check out at breakneck speed. Or you may want to use self checkout, which seems to be pretty new in Korea, as far as I understood. The cool thing is the machine speaks English in case you don't want to interact with a human clerk. In that case, you should know it's possible to order groceries on line too. It's delivered in no time, of course. And if you really want to avoid talking to someone, we recently discovered this in Yangsan : "ㅇㅇㅅㅋㄹ" is a small shop with no employees, only a self checkout machine and a lot of CCTV cameras.  You can only get ice cream and snacks so far (I believe their name comes from 아이스크림, which means "Ice cream", they just took the first letter of each block of letters), but I wouldn't be surprised if it diversified in the future.

ㅇㅇㅅㅋㄹ

But it's more fun to explore the bustling aisles of a Korean supermarket if you ask me.