Shopping

When we arrived in Manila, one of the ladies said to me that shopping was very time consuming here. I thought to myself, “Shopping is time consuming in the US too.” However, now I understand what she meant. As I have mentioned before, almost everything you need to do can be done at the mall. We grocery shop, get our hardware, pay our bills, get our prescriptions, watch movies, eat out, and even go to church at the mall! However, not all of these activities are available at one mall. So you find yourself running from mall to mall to get what you need. And as a side note, the two main malls we visit are only 5 miles apart, but can take 30 minutes to an hour to go from one to the other because of traffic and road construction.

The other day I went to the mall looking for a squeegee. I know most Americans do not use squeegees on a weekly basis, but here they are used a lot for cleaning purposes. I went into Ace Hardware looking for the squeegee. Sure enough, there were all kinds of squeegee heads, but when I asked the store clerk about the poles that attach to the squeegee heads; he informed me that they didn’t have any! Perhaps an Ace Hardware in another mall ended up with all the poles, and this one with all the squeegee heads. I am still looking for that.

Next I went to the grocery store. Luckily, I only needed a few items that day. I quickly found the items I was looking for, and proceeded to the cash register, with the items in hand, to buy them. There were three open cash registers, with no customers in line and cashiers standing around waiting for someone to come through their line. I chose one and was about to put my items on the counter, when the cashier informed me that I was in the wrong line. I needed to be in the basket line. I walked to the basket line to find fifteen people standing there waiting to be checked out. “This is crazy!” I thought. I decided to put my items into a grocery cart and try the empty lines again. Sure enough, it worked. So I learned that you must have a grocery cart if you want to go through the cart line. Never mind how many products are in your cart. And you must go through the basket line if you are carrying your items or have a basket of items. Never mind how many things are in your basket. It is a new way of thinking! I am not going to change their way of thinking, so I must learn to work within the system.

Another thing we are learning to live with is the amount of employees when you walk into a store. We walked into a store in the mall looking for shoes for Nathaniel. As we approached the shoe section, we were “assaulted” by at least seven store attendants ready to assist us. We were so overwhelmed as all we really wanted to do was price out shoes and consider our options. (We estimate that there is approximately 1 store attendant for every 100 sq ft of floor space.) We let them know we were just looking, and as we walked down the aisles, we found ourselves followed by five of the attendants with several others standing nearby watching us. We have learned that although you have come into a Wal-Mart type store, the employees can be working for different companies. For instance, you might have a section of Nike shoes, and the employees in that section know nothing about anything else in the store but Nike shoes. And next to them might be the employees that only help you with Reebok shoes. We have also learned that many of them are hired to simply make sure that things are not stolen. We are learning that it is futile to ask someone in the towel section where you would find floor rags. They will send you on a scavenger hunt all over the store, and you still will not find what you are looking for. It is better to just look, and if you don’t see it, they probably don’t have it. We are learning to work within the system and not to get frustrated when it doesn’t work like the system back home that we are used to. Another thing that we have learned is that the store clerks are only hired for a maximum of six months at time to ensure that the store does not have to pay benefits to them. If a store attendant is good, another branch of the store might hire him for another six months. The store branches work independent of each other. Thus, no one really knows anything. Imagine changing jobs every six months!

When I walk into the store, the store attendants always address me, “Good Morning, Ma’m Sir.” It isn’t that they can’t tell if I am a man or woman. And it isn’t that their English is poor. It is that in Tagalog, there is only one word that is used to address both men and women in a respectful manner. That word is Po. So for some reason, they always address me, “Ma’m Sir.” Kind of a funny little quirk.

A friend of ours here told us that the people in the village where they work always thought their kids were so polite because they called her Ma’m. They were actually calling her Mom. 