A fool and his money

Hong Kong has a few supermarkets that are aimed squarely at the expat community - Citysuper (in Times Square, Harbour City and IFC 2), Great (in Pacific Place), and Olivers (in the Princes building).

The majority of the customers are gweilos (Brits, Australians, Americans, Canadians, Europeans) and Japanese, and the shops tend to have different ranges for the two groups - my comments are mainly about "gweilo food". I have very mixed feelings about them - on the one hand it's great to be able to buy things that are otherwise unavailable, but on the other hand the prices are very scary.

I don't visit these shops very often, mainly because, when I do, I end up walking around picking things up, and then putting them down when I see the price. Then I tell myself that I am being stupid and I should just pay the money and not worry about it.

The first time I went in to citysuper I remember seeing some yoghurts and thinking that the price looked quite reasonable, until I discovered that they charged that price (HK$14 or thereabouts) for each single pot, not for the pack of four!! This is for an ordinary yoghurt that is available in supermarkets in France for a fraction of that price.

I don't mind paying a modest premium for imported products, but I do object to paying a high price for run-of-the-mill products. Assuming that it is the cost of shipping that makes these products expensive, but that is a fixed cost regardless of whether it is a cheap or an expensive product, so why not import the good stuff? If you go to Harvey Nichols food hall you pay high prices, but the quality is also very high. Here it sometimes seems that we are paying Harvey Nichols prices for Tesco products!

For example, the cheese counter has some fairly ordinary cheeses at extraordinary prices. I wouldn't mind paying for really good cheese, but this is mainly mass-produced stuff! I did find some decent Cheddar in Great, but typically they didn't label it with the name of the producer - it just said "cloth bound Cheddar". On the other hand, I bought some Stilton a while back, but it had only been matured for about a week and I didn't enjoy it at all.

The selection of meat in most 'ordinary' supermarkets in Hong Kong is not very impressive (though my local Wellcome does sell fresh New Zealand lamb). Unfortunately the prices in the expat supermarkets are quite high, and a lot of the meat has previously been frozen.

Fruit and vegetables in the expat supermarkets are also expensive, but again the quality is variable. I sometimes look in total disbelief at the prices they are charging for very ordinary produce!

Sometimes they get it right - Great sell a range of fresh sausages from Waitrose (an upmarket supermarket in the UK) for just under HK$50 per pack. I'm guessing that they sell for £3 or thereabouts in the UK, which is HK$40 at today's exchange rate (and so I think they'll increasing the prices if the rate stays the same for much longer).

Going off at a tangent, I noticed a poster advertising Beaujolais Nouveau when I was in Great this week. This really is a triumph of marketing, and whoever it was who thought of promoting the stuff all over the world deserves to be very rich. Beaujolais Nouveau is very immature wine that is fermented rapidly, and so does not develop the characteristic depth of flavour and tannins that are normally found in red wines. In a good year it is clean and fruity, but in a bad year it tastes of almost nothing!

Around 1985, some of the wine producers started promoting it by organizing a race to get the first bottles to London. It was a huge success, and for a few weeks in late November and early December it became the perfect excuse for going to a wine bar. A few years later I worked for a company that had drinking as a very strong part of the culture, and we didn't need much of an excuse anyway, but we had a few Beaujolais Nouveau nights!

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