Shopping and the Middle Class

Shopping in Uruguay, particularly outside the two large population centers of Montevideo and Maldonado / Punta del Este, is a different experience than contemporary shopping in the West. Most notably, the absence of “big box” stores means that many trips to various stores are needed in place of the “one-stop-shop”.

While your time will suffer as a consequence, I would like to highlight the overwhelming benefit you will gain with the loss of convenience.

One, middle class. Uruguay has the largest middle class in Latin America and while the middle class is being hollowed out in the United States as monopolistic powers grow and eat up ever more market share, Uruguay has numerous families able to earn a living because of the store they own and operate. The wealth is not concentrated in the hands of a few large stores and those who own them.

Two, connections, because the owner of the store is often in the store that you visit, they will come to know you and you them. Without putting too fine a point on it, this is precisely the network of human bonds that create strong communities. People behave differently when others know them and they know there will be a future encounter. You might think of it as a self-enforcing politeness mechanism. Conversely, in the anonymous world of big box stores (and worse with online shopping), treating employees and other shoppers in a way lacking humanity unfortunately increasingly becomes the norm.

Three, choice, because there are so many individuals plying their trade in retail commerce as a buyer you have an increased number of options. Your business simply matters more to the store and given that you may be interacting with the owner, it’s not hard to understand why you can feel the increased significance you have to that enterprise and the marketplace. You can choose who to spend money with.

This is not to say that Montevideo does not have supermarkets on a scale found in the United States, though they are rare, or that there are not large hardware stores, however, outside of the grocery chains there are very few national chains and even then they exist in an economic ecosystem of independent competitors.

As an American who was accustomed to strip malls with all the known chains, it was initially frustrating to me to visit a green grocery for produce after just coming from a national-chain grocery store.

There is something amazingly charming in having more than one store that sells exclusively the pasta they make there in shop and this in a rural town of only 25,000 (Treinta y tres). The initial inconvenience was replaced with a respect for a commercial system that spreads wealth throughout my community and the familiar faces that I now encounter.

Marco