Going to the Supermarket in Cairo

May 20, 2006

Getting home from a week-long trip meant going to the supermarket to restock. Our stop of choice now is the Alfa Market on the Corniche, the main road running beside the Nile. Alfa Market, along with the similar Metro stores, caters to American expectations in grocery shopping.. although plenty of Egyptians also do grocery shopping here. [I got in trouble for taking this picture. As soon as I had snapped the shot an Egyptian policeman was running over to tell me I cannot take pictures there. So this is the shot that the Egyptian government does not want you to see!]

Here is Emily picking up some vegetables.. OK, lots of vegetables. Let's see: a tray of eggplant, another one of red peppers.. and why not a third of onions? All these little trays are amazingly inexpensive by American standards.. generally less than a dollar.

There is even a small health food section at Alfa Market.. not quite Whole Foods, granted. We have also found a "House of Health", a little store that sells tofu and brown rice and other healthy foods.

This is a view inside the Alfa Market. At the right is the sweets stand, with a girl lazily reading something. Shoppers push around metal-wired carts.. as one would expect.

Here are two girls stocking shelves. I often wonder about the economic background of the people working at westernized businesses in Egypt and the Middle East broadly. My sense is that they are from well to do backgrounds.. and that these jobs represent an easy first job.. something they may well have landed through family connections. Whereas in the United States the McDonalds and grocery store workers tend to be filled by middle class youth and lower class workers.. We have a service class, marked by ethnic or racial divisions. Those divisions are present here too.. but the westernized businesses are high enough on the economic totem pole to draw people from above the service classes.. preferably young bright well-to-do young people.