French Life-expat France

Those of you who are regular visitors to France will know that shop opening hours are a bit different to those in the UK. That is to say, shops are almost never open in France and always open in the UK.

When we first moved to France this all seemed a bit strange, but we, like 60 million French people, quickly adjusted. Shops are often closed on mondays and take three hour lunchbreaks, but this just becomes part of the routine. There is no danger of an ‘open 24 hours a day’ shop opening here very soon. Even our local city-centre supermarket - called Huit à Huit (eight to eight) is not open anything like ‘eight to eight’.

The main time this is mildly amusing to me is when holidaymakers arrive, as they always do, at 7pm on a Saturday, tired from their journey, and looking for somewhere to pick up some groceries to make the first French style dinner of their holiday. Being told that the supermarket will be open at 9am Tuesday morning - three days into a one week holiday - doesn’t always raise a smile, and many is the time we have had to hunt through our own food stores to feed a desperate and starving family.

It is a shame that we tend to eat a lot of pasta and rice ourselves, and very little meat, because a kidney bean casserole or chickpea curry isn’t usually what our guests had planned for their first meal and very often that is all we can offer. We always try and have a tin of confit de canard set aside for just such an emergency, but usually end up eating it ourselves before the occasion arises to give it away.

In fact there is a very good market nearby on a Sunday morning and the local shop is also open, so it isn’t quiet as serious as I am making out, but you know what I mean.

The other characteristic of the local shops is their staffing arrangements. In the UK you might find 15 cash desks open at four o’clock in the morning in case there is a rush of nurses returning from the nightshift and wanting to stock up on chocolate biscuits. Here in France, on the other hand, it could be 9.15 on a Tuesday morning, in a shop completely packed with shoppers, and there will be at most two girls on duty at the cash desks. Unfortunately they will be talking to each other rather than serving customers, so there is usually a substantial wait to pay for your carton of milk.

Don’t take this to be a criticism of French shops, just a statement of the differences. Every customer has to be greeted, chatted to for a few minutes, helped to pack their shopping and so on. This compares with the UK ‘express train’ approach, where if you drop your credit card or money on the floor, the 15 seconds you take to retrieve it will have driven the person behind you in the queue into a wild fury at the terrible delay they are being put through.

In passing, I should say I used the word ‘girls’ rather than ’staff’ in one sentence above only after careful consideration, but I can’t remember ever seeing a male staff member in our supermarket, except for the butcher behind the meat counter, and the store manager who emerges down the stairs once every few days to criticise something or other.

Overall I believe that if you, like us, live life without the stresses and strains of having to be at the office by 7.45am, or needing to collect the children from the nanny before 7pm, the French approach is to be welcomed. And so it is, especially by Mrs B, who regularly pops out to get the bread first thing in the morning and barely makes it home before lunchtime.