New Mexico Food

Life in Mexico: Grocery Shopping
By Cindi Bower

One of the many reasons we chose to expatriate to Mexico, Guanajuato specifically, was we would be able to walk wherever we needed to go. We would no longer have to have a car for transportation as we did in Kansas City. A worry we had about aging was wondering what we would do when we could no longer drive. Kansas City has a bus system, but it does not cover the whole city. To get to a bus stop, you either have to drive your car somewhere and park, or you have to walk quite a distance. Walking to do errands is next to impossible because of the distances involved, not to mention the danger of crossing busy 6-lane (or wider!) streets and highways to get to your destination.

Guanajuato is a small city where it is possible to walk just about anywhere you want to go. If the weather is inclement or you have packages to carry, there are bus routes to nearly every part of the city. There are also plenty of taxis to get you where you need to go.

Even though Guanajuato has buses and taxis, we found we had to make some changes in our grocery shopping habits after we moved here.

In Kansas City, it was easy to shop for groceries. A quick trip in the car to the store, a spin through the aisles, and another quick trip home in the car was all it took…less than an hour. The stores were usually well stocked. We rarely faced a shortage of any product.

Our shopping experiences were confined to huge, impersonal supermarkets. We rarely saw anyone we knew among the other shoppers. The employees, most anyway, were barely civil. We were just part of the faceless wave of people surging in and out, day after day. Why make the effort to initiate or maintain personal relationships with such a hoard?

Mexico has its share of supermarkets and mega stores just like the USA. However, Mexico has a different venue for your shopping pleasure…one swept out of existence years ago by the flood of "progress" in the States.

The small "mom-and-pop" stores, once part of the fabric of life in the States, still exist in Mexico. In fact, they are the preferred places to shop and exchange news with neighbors.