3 ms·

If you go to an "old-school" Asian grocer, the shelves are packed to the rafters, there's essentially no signage in English, and you can't help but feel like yo

If you go to an "old-school" Asian grocer, the shelves are packed to the rafters, there's essentially no signage in English, and you can't help but feel like you're getting in the way of the regulars. This feels much less welcoming, while an H Mart style place that's laid out and brightly lit like a "regular" supermarket is much more conducive to exploration.

mc32 5y ago
I don't know. You're just another shopper to them. The shopkeeper wants turnover, no matter who you are. Sure, they will look out for shoplifters more than regular supermarkets because their margins are even thinner, but if you become recognizable (patronizing semi regularly) no one will care. They may at first have some slight trepidation about returns (you buying something not knowing what it is), but if you become even semi regular, you're just another shopper. I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  I'm not saying the grocer doesn't want you there -- I'm saying you feel like you're literally in the way (as in, physically blocking the aisle) if you stand around the snack aisle scratching your head, while the regulars are making a beeline for the fish sauce and packs of mala tofu skin.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness. Respectfully, you may be overthinking it. If you take it at face value, this is simply a business designing their retail experience with new customers in mind. This isn't a "political correctness" thing. People new to serious comic book stores, stone and gravel retailers, etc. can easily feel overwhelmed and a bit lost in the same way.
  - mc32 5y ago
    I get the H Mart strategy. What I don’t quite understand is the feeling of “cultural intrusion”. Ok I can feel cramped. Where or how does cultural intrusion enter the picture? Is that like trying to sit with the jocks at the lunch table in high school and they look at you weird like you’re intruding their culture?
    - browningstreet 5y ago
      I don’t like the phrase either, but I wonder if it wasn’t meant to be more benign.. as in, you go to a grocery store catering to locals of another culture, and you walk up and down the aisle, you don’t understand any of the packaging, and you can get the sense that if you laugh or have a “thats weird food” reaction to any of it, that’d be rude, so you hold it in. I grew up as the child of east European immigrants, and growing up we’d always had our own stores to buy food from the homeland. They’re gone, for the most part, but I can walk into most Russian grocery stores and get what I want, but I don’t understand most of the Russian options. Asking about some of the foods can lead to a strained or confusing conversation.
    - kyawzazaw 5y ago
      I am an Asian and I feel the cultural intrusion if I go to a different kind of Asian store. They don't look at you weird. You just feel it. My analogy would be wearing shoes inside a house when they typically don't wear.
- derefr 5y ago
  They're not talking being judged by the employees. They're talking being judged by the other shoppers. Imagine being a foreign tourist to America, going into a middle-American Wal-Mart — one far away from places where any tourists would ever bother to visit. Some American dudebro wandering through the aisle asks you a question (in English), and then gets pissed off when they realize that you don't speak English, and starts berating you and wondering out loud what his town is coming to. The social-anxiety expectation for the experience of shopping in a small neighbourhood ethnic grocery store, is the projected reverse of that: the shoppers there seeing you there bumbling about, unable to pronounce any of the names of the items, and responding by wondering angrily in $language what their district-of-the-town is coming to, i.e. when their nice little ethnic enclave community got so gentrified/whitewashed that "people like that" started showing up. (Despite being white, it's the racist American dudebro part of this that I've experienced before, second-hand, while taking my (non-white) partner on a trip to show them a more-rural area I used to live in. That was an experience I don't want to repeat.)
spaetzleesser 5y ago
“ you can't help but feel like you're getting in the way of the regulars.” I usually get treated as a funny curiosity in Thai and Indian stores. The feeling of being intrusive or in the way is self imposed. I don’t get annoyed at Asian people in Western stores either.
chestertn 5y ago
It surprises me how lenient the US is about American business not providing English signage. Wouldn’t this be considered a form of discrimination? I’m sure that if a German grocery store were to open in Paris with only German signage there would be an outrage.
- dogsgobork 5y ago
  The US doesn't have an official language, nothing preventing anyone from running a store using only Lojban if they wanted.
- the_lonely_road 5y ago
  The long hand of the market takes care of this. If you want to hire only people that speak French and hang up only signage in French in a city with 99.9% English speakers, there are dozens of middle men with their hand out eager to help you get set up. Staying open is your business not theirs.
- ska 5y ago
  > US is about American business not providing English signage. Why would they? English doesn't have a legally protected status.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Food labels, especially nutritional data and the list of ingredients must have at least an English translation. So even if the signage doesn't have to be in English, you can look at the nutrition label on the back for some clue. Some local jurisdictions do require translations on signs. The City of Doraville in metro Atlanta has a high Asian population and stores are required to have an English translation for their signs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Animats 5y ago
There are still places like that in SF's Chinatown. There's enough customer density to support a walk-in market that doesn't use shopping carts. SF's Chinatown has twice the population density of SF. And a median age of 47, almost 10 years higher than the rest of SF. So there are still old-school Asian grocery stores. Nijya Market has a number of good Japanese grocery stores in the SF bay area. They're rather expensive, like Whole Foods. Noted for fresh fish and sushi. Also, they have the good Pocky, from Japan, not the made-in-Thailand stuff. Their stores are small supermarkets, with carts and parking. SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. Where are the black-glass buildings, the fast forward fashion from Beijing, the automated stores, and the latest parts from Shenzhen? They're in Cupertino, home of Apple, which is 67% Asian and has entire malls of good Asian stores. The big mall across the street from the Apple mothership is a good place to start.
- injinj 5y ago
  I prefer the 1950s style, the produce isn't wrapped to death in plastic. My general rule is that the more plastic it has, the further away it was produced. The small Asian places have their own farm pipeline for the specialty vegetables, not industrial scale farms like from a Safeway. I cannot resist the allure of Nijiya, though, as they will have veggies and fruits that nobody else has.

mc32 5y ago

I don't know. You're just another shopper to them. The shopkeeper wants turnover, no matter who you are. Sure, they will look out for shoplifters more than regular supermarkets because their margins are even thinner, but if you become recognizable (patronizing semi regularly) no one will care. They may at first have some slight trepidation about returns (you buying something not knowing what it is), but if you become even semi regular, you're just another shopper. I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness.

Clewza313 5y ago
I'm not saying the grocer doesn't want you there -- I'm saying you feel like you're literally in the way (as in, physically blocking the aisle) if you stand around the snack aisle scratching your head, while the regulars are making a beeline for the fish sauce and packs of mala tofu skin.
CharlesW 5y ago
> I fee like this is a bit of weird "Othering" but dressed up in some weird sense of correctness. Respectfully, you may be overthinking it. If you take it at face value, this is simply a business designing their retail experience with new customers in mind. This isn't a "political correctness" thing. People new to serious comic book stores, stone and gravel retailers, etc. can easily feel overwhelmed and a bit lost in the same way.
- mc32 5y ago
  I get the H Mart strategy. What I don’t quite understand is the feeling of “cultural intrusion”. Ok I can feel cramped. Where or how does cultural intrusion enter the picture? Is that like trying to sit with the jocks at the lunch table in high school and they look at you weird like you’re intruding their culture?
  - browningstreet 5y ago
    I don’t like the phrase either, but I wonder if it wasn’t meant to be more benign.. as in, you go to a grocery store catering to locals of another culture, and you walk up and down the aisle, you don’t understand any of the packaging, and you can get the sense that if you laugh or have a “thats weird food” reaction to any of it, that’d be rude, so you hold it in. I grew up as the child of east European immigrants, and growing up we’d always had our own stores to buy food from the homeland. They’re gone, for the most part, but I can walk into most Russian grocery stores and get what I want, but I don’t understand most of the Russian options. Asking about some of the foods can lead to a strained or confusing conversation.
  - kyawzazaw 5y ago
    I am an Asian and I feel the cultural intrusion if I go to a different kind of Asian store. They don't look at you weird. You just feel it. My analogy would be wearing shoes inside a house when they typically don't wear.
derefr 5y ago
They're not talking being judged by the employees. They're talking being judged by the other shoppers. Imagine being a foreign tourist to America, going into a middle-American Wal-Mart — one far away from places where any tourists would ever bother to visit. Some American dudebro wandering through the aisle asks you a question (in English), and then gets pissed off when they realize that you don't speak English, and starts berating you and wondering out loud what his town is coming to. The social-anxiety expectation for the experience of shopping in a small neighbourhood ethnic grocery store, is the projected reverse of that: the shoppers there seeing you there bumbling about, unable to pronounce any of the names of the items, and responding by wondering angrily in $language what their district-of-the-town is coming to, i.e. when their nice little ethnic enclave community got so gentrified/whitewashed that "people like that" started showing up. (Despite being white, it's the racist American dudebro part of this that I've experienced before, second-hand, while taking my (non-white) partner on a trip to show them a more-rural area I used to live in. That was an experience I don't want to repeat.)

spaetzleesser 5y ago

“ you can't help but feel like you're getting in the way of the regulars.” I usually get treated as a funny curiosity in Thai and Indian stores. The feeling of being intrusive or in the way is self imposed. I don’t get annoyed at Asian people in Western stores either.

chestertn 5y ago

It surprises me how lenient the US is about American business not providing English signage. Wouldn’t this be considered a form of discrimination? I’m sure that if a German grocery store were to open in Paris with only German signage there would be an outrage.

dogsgobork 5y ago
The US doesn't have an official language, nothing preventing anyone from running a store using only Lojban if they wanted.
the_lonely_road 5y ago
The long hand of the market takes care of this. If you want to hire only people that speak French and hang up only signage in French in a city with 99.9% English speakers, there are dozens of middle men with their hand out eager to help you get set up. Staying open is your business not theirs.
ska 5y ago
> US is about American business not providing English signage. Why would they? English doesn't have a legally protected status.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Food labels, especially nutritional data and the list of ingredients must have at least an English translation. So even if the signage doesn't have to be in English, you can look at the nutrition label on the back for some clue. Some local jurisdictions do require translations on signs. The City of Doraville in metro Atlanta has a high Asian population and stores are required to have an English translation for their signs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Animats 5y ago

There are still places like that in SF's Chinatown. There's enough customer density to support a walk-in market that doesn't use shopping carts. SF's Chinatown has twice the population density of SF. And a median age of 47, almost 10 years higher than the rest of SF. So there are still old-school Asian grocery stores. Nijya Market has a number of good Japanese grocery stores in the SF bay area. They're rather expensive, like Whole Foods. Noted for fresh fish and sushi. Also, they have the good Pocky, from Japan, not the made-in-Thailand stuff. Their stores are small supermarkets, with carts and parking. SF's Chinatown is stuck in the 1950s. Where are the black-glass buildings, the fast forward fashion from Beijing, the automated stores, and the latest parts from Shenzhen? They're in Cupertino, home of Apple, which is 67% Asian and has entire malls of good Asian stores. The big mall across the street from the Apple mothership is a good place to start.

injinj 5y ago
I prefer the 1950s style, the produce isn't wrapped to death in plastic. My general rule is that the more plastic it has, the further away it was produced. The small Asian places have their own farm pipeline for the specialty vegetables, not industrial scale farms like from a Safeway. I cannot resist the allure of Nijiya, though, as they will have veggies and fruits that nobody else has.