Low price madness

Seeing the havoc caused by several thousands of people at the opening of the first MediaMarkt store in Poland reminded me of how things looked around here when the first Metro supermarket opened near Baia Mare in December 2001. It wasn’t as bad as in Poland but I myself and almost everyone I knew was going crazy about those few price cuts and the perspective of a cheaper Christmas shopping experience back then. So I remember the stories of the jammed national roadway between Baia Mare and Satu Mare (where the Metro store is located) on the opening day, of the hours of waiting in the checkout line in the first weeks and mostly of the low prices everyone was raving about back then.

The funny thing is that the store is still enjoying great popularity more than two years after it’s opening. Even if two other supermarkets (Profi and Artima) opened in the meantime in Baia Mare there are still quite a few shoppers at any given time in Metro and going there before major holidays can still result in about an hour of cueing in front of the registers… But I must admit: I really like shopping there. I like to push a cart around even if at times it contains nothing except a few blank CDs or other small stuff. Still, I just love snaking around all those shelves checking out the prices, putting my hands on stuff and occasionally grabbing this and that. That’s what I call “shelf shopping”.