A supermarket on every corner

Well, it’s official. We are now almost completely surrounded by supermarkets on our city block (three of four corners are occupied), so that soon it will be impossible for me to leave my house without encountering a supermarket. The Turkish convenience store with its friendly proprietors and wonderful variety on one corner closed a few months ago after losing its license to sell beer. And as is always the case when that happens in Norway, they go out of business rather quickly, whether or not they are a small grocery store or a restaurant. You cannot survive without the beer or liquor sales. The same will happen to one of my favorite pizza restaurants right down the road from us; they lost their liquor license a few months ago and that will most likely be their death knell.

Back to the supermarkets. I googled supermarkets in Norway and retrieved this Wikipedia listing. This then is a list of supermarket chains in Norway, broken down into Discount stores, Supermarkets, Hypermarkets, and Convenience stores. To me, they’re all variants on the same theme—supermarkets, large or small.

·         Discount: Bunnpris, Coop Marked, Coop Prix, Kiwi, REMA 1000, RIMI, Rimi Stormarked

·         Supermarkets: Centra, Coop Mega, ICA Gourmet, ICA Supermarked, Meny, SPAR, Ultra

·         Hypermarkets: ICA Maxi, Coop Obs!, Smart Club

·         Convenience Stores: ICA Nær, Joker, 7-eleven, Narvesen

I wouldn’t mind being surrounded by supermarkets if they offered a real variety of groceries, in other words, if they were different from each other. But they are not. Two of the supermarkets are the same chain—Joker (I know, what a name); the other one is Bunnpris (literally translated as ‘bottom price’). I have no major problems with any of them, just that they all offer homogeny. It’s all the same, a standardized foodstuff menu with limited choices. If you want slightly more variety and breadth of choice, you have to go elsewhere, like ICA Maxi, Centra or Meny. Thank God they exist. What makes me laugh is that this is such a small country; at last count, roughly 5 million people. Why do we need so many supermarkets? Soon there will be one supermarket per 100 people or per one large apartment building. I’m not joking. I cannot understand how they all can turn a profit. I’m not sure it matters to the food chain owners, who are wealthy beyond belief. All I can say is, ‘oh bliss--I no longer have to walk too far to find a grocery store’ (a little sarcasm never hurts). 

Land of Milk and Honey

There is now a supermarket on every corner in Oslo. Well ok, I am exaggerating a bit, but it seems like that. ICA, Rimi, Rema 1000, Kiwi, Spar, Meny, Joker, Bunnpris and Coop are the major supermarket chains, and within each chain there are stores of different sizes that are appropriately named--Mini (small), Maxi (large), Mega (very large) and Nær (Near, as opposed to Far, but there are no supermarkets named Fjern or Langt borte (means ‘far’) and so on. So not only do we have all of the different supermarket chains, we also have ICA-Maxis, ICA-Nærs and Coop-Megas. There are easily eight supermarkets within walking distance of our co-op complex--Joker, Bunnpris, two Rema 1000s; ICA, ICA-Nær, Meny and Kiwi. And if you don’t feel like walking the 5 to 10 minutes it takes to get to them, you can also call them and ask them to deliver or you can go online and order from them over the internet.

This is quite different from the situation I found myself in when I first moved to Oslo. There was one major supermarket and it was about a 30-minute walk from our home and a 10-minute drive by car. It was called Arena Mat (translated as Arena Food) and it was a big deal to go and shop there, at least for me. It was not a very large store compared to the enormous Pathmark stores I used to frequent in Yonkers and New Jersey. Because like many other European countries, most people did their food shopping at the small neighborhood daily stores, which sold bread, milk, vegetables, fruit, cigarettes and beer and not much more. It was a much simpler existence, often a bit frustrating but nevertheless simpler. Most of those stores are gone now, overtaken by the larger supermarkets. The small daily stores that are left are struggling to survive.

Our trips to Arena Mat were always fruitful. I would come home with a big bottle of Heinz ketchup or Hellman’s mayonnaise (American products were like a magnet for me) and it felt like I had won the lottery. If I found Tropicana orange juice or Campbell’s mushroom soup, I was also happy. It wasn’t that the Norwegian equivalents were bad products (if you could in fact find equivalents); it was just that feeling of seeing products that reminded me of home. It was comforting to see them and to know that they had made their way to other countries and that one of those countries was Norway. Arena Mat evolved into another supermarket after some years, bought out by the larger supermarket conglomerates that have sprung up. The families that started these newer chains became wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. But that was the 1990s. A lot of people became wealthy during the 1990s. It was a global phenomenon. Norway was the land of milk and honey then. Oil flowed and money flowed and while the oil is still flowing anno 2010, the rivers of money are slowly drying up, thanks to the politicians who are now stepping in to cut (where they can) the social programs and healthcare programs and all the other fringe benefits that a socialist democratic country enjoys. But the supermarket chains continue to spring up on each corner, along with the Deli De Luca convenience stores that overtook the Seven-11 stores (also one of my favorites during the 1990s--they sold Snapple drinks and Haagen Daaz ice cream and every now and then American candy like Milky Way bars). I have to wonder how they’re all managing to make a good living, but I imagine that time will give us that answer. In the meantime we are being exponentially inundated with the same products in spite of the diversity of supermarket choice, because the one thing the multiple supermarket chains have not managed to give us is diversity of choice when it comes to food products. That type of diversity these days is found in the few remaining daily food stores that are struggling to survive. The question is whether they will survive in the land of milk and honey.