WalMart in Beijing
You may think that I should be thrilled that we have a WalMart here in Beijing. But I had been warned to NOT expect anything that even resembles an American WalMart. Therefore, I stayed away. Until this week. The time had finally come for me to go and check it out.
They were right! It was nothing like what we see in America (which can be sort of a good thing since where I live WalMart brings out the most questionable people). Nevertheless, the only thing that is the same is the name, the symbol, some yellow smiley faces here and there and their own off brand. Besides that, it looks completely different than ours, see below.
Does your WalMart have a giant blow-up Dragon greeting you? Probably not. This guy is solely to celebrate the upcoming festivities, as are many of the red decorations in the other pics below.
Does your WalMart have aisles and aisles of fresh food? How about counters that cook your food for you? This one does! Too bad none of the food is anything I would even try.
Does your WalMart have a room-size Dove candy display, including a Dove uniformed salesgirl with a microphone, referring to a tv about Dove? I think not.
Does your WalMart have about 50 billion Chinese people in lines in the middle of a weekday? This store was way too overwhelming for me. I couldn't get out of there quickly enough. I much prefer Carrefour.
I will tell you what our Beijing WalMart DOES NOT have. It does not have ink cartridges for printers. Oh, it has printers...just not the ink! It also does not have swim caps. Now I know this sounds a little random considering it is 22 degrees in Beijing right now. But, you see, we joined a gym with a pool and swim caps are required. So, the two things that we went to WalMart for they did not have. They did have lots and lots of red underwear for the upcoming Chinese New Year.
More about red underwear in my next post....until then.
1 comment:
Did you find a swim cap? You might try Decathlon, a French chain of sport stores very similar to Academy. There's one along 4th Ring Road, in the southeast, just south of Guangqu Road. (You can see it on Google Maps if you search for "Decathlon Beijing")
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