Sunday, November 30, 2008

Tesco Lotus in Thailand

Hello from Bangkok, the land of smile and closed airports. Heh. There may not be any Fresh & Easy here but there are plenty of Tesco Lotus around.

Tesco Lotus is like a Super Wal-Mart. It has everything from clothing to groceries, gardening to pharmacy. You can find just about anything there.

We were in one, shopping for some fruits to take to my friend's house for dinner. As we walked through the long, refrigerated dairy aisle, I came to a halt and started laughing.

"What?" Brandon and my friend Lily asked.

I pointed at the one section of the fridge.

"It's the Fresh & Easy bargain bin!"

Yep. They have it too, just this one little section.

Over in the produce aisle, you can buy whole fruits by the kilo, or you can buy pre-cut packaged pieces. Lily picked up peeled and ready to eat pomelo sections and whole bundles of fresh longans.

There was a section of "imported fruits" where we found apples, kiwis, and some very sad looking avocados.

The Tesco influence stopped there as there is no self check-out station in sight. Thai people don't really trust the honor system. However, over 30 check out stations with only 5 out of service was quite impressive.

We didn't have time to browse the rest of the store for me to do further F&E/Tesco Lotus reporting so I can't tell you about their heat-and-eat section or anything. I'm sure, being Thailand, they have an impressive array of those.

See you back stateside...hopefully sooner than later!

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