Supermarkets in Vietnam offer new shopping scene
HANOI - To a Vietnamese shopper unaccustomed to a modern market, the 20-pound bird in the cooler looked downright bizarre.
``How could a chicken be that big?'' asked Do Thuyet Nhung, 43, staring in disbelief at a frozen Utah-bred turkey. ``I've never seen anything like it!''
Nhung and most other Vietnamese are used to shopping in Vietnam's traditional outdoor markets, where the clucking chickens weigh about three pounds and vendors cut their throats and pluck them on the spot. But like so much else in the country these days, the way people shop is being transformed as the country rapidly modernizes.
Western-style supermarkets and cavernous wholesale markets similar to Costco or Sam's Club are starting to arrive. They offer a clean and efficient alternative to the noisy, pungent outdoor bazaars where customers haggle over everything and hope they don't get knocked over by the motorbikes that cruise the narrow aisles.
The new markets could eventually change the way Vietnam's food-supply chain operates and cause economic upheaval for the poor, small farmers and traditional intermediaries unfamiliar with the modern system.
But for now, it appears that there is room in the food-selling industry for the old and the new to coexist, as they do in so many realms of Vietnamese life.
Vietnam has roughly 140 modern supermarkets, up from just 10 a decade ago, according to the Ministry of Trade. Twenty more are under construction or will break ground soon.
Novelty markets
To shoppers such as Dang Kim Khue, a Hanoi homemaker, the new stores are still such a novelty that she visits them as if she were going to a museum. She goes not to buy but to gawk.
``It's very clean and tidy,'' Khue said during a recent trip to the Fivimart, a private Vietnamese company, which offers customers a wide array of shampoos and toothpastes, detergents and skin creams. Like its U.S. counterparts, the Hanoi store lures customers with discount coupons and fliers bursting with special offers.
An array of Asian brands stands alongside a slew of familiar Western names: Lux, Dove, Tang, Nescafé, Coffee-Mate, Whiskas. Vietnam's communist government does not place limits on the sales of foreign brands, but 70 percent of the goods on Fivimart's shelves are locally produced.
For shoppers in a hurry, the market offers rotisserie-cooked chickens, perfectly browned like their U.S. counterparts but with one difference: They haven't lost their heads.
``The meat and the fish are always kept in a freezer, so they are really fresh,'' said Nguyen thi Ut, a Hanoi office worker who comes to the Fivimart twice a week.
She used to shop at an outdoor market where the meat sat in ice-free baskets on the sidewalk, a haven for bugs and germs.
``I might get sick if I eat that meat,'' Ut said. ``The food costs a little more at the supermarket, but it's worth it.''
Not everyone agrees with Ut, especially the legions of Vietnamese at the bottom of the economic pyramid where people still earn little more than a dollar a day. They shop at small curbside groceries or larger outdoor markets such as Hanoi's 1912, also known as ``Hell's Market'' because it stands atop a burial ground for soldiers who died during Vietnam's war against the French.
Here customers can buy everything from cured dog meat -- the browned carcasses are stacked neatly in a row -- to live rabbits or pigeons or eels swimming in plastic buckets.
With the sellers crammed side by side in tiny booths, space is at a premium. Vendors like 73-year-old Chu thi Tuat, who has had a booth in the 1912 for 30 years, surround themselves with mounds of whatever they are selling, from buckets of dried mushrooms to sacks of rice, leaving themselves perhaps a square foot in which to maneuver.
Tuat stands wedged among stacks of dried shrimp, dried mushrooms and betel nuts. ``Ngon lam,'' said Tuat, whose lips are bright red from chewing the nuts all day long. ``Very delicious.''
Various aromas mingle in the air, wafting from discarded chicken parts, dried shrimp, freshly chopped fish heads, and motorbike tailpipes, among many other things. But the brightly colored fruits and vegetables are stacked gloriously high, and the prices are always right.
``I can always choose fresh stuff here,'' said Nguyen thi Anh Nguyet, standing by a heap of leafy greens. ``The supermarket food isn't fresh enough to satisfy me.''
The sellers at the 1912 say they are unconcerned about their new competition. ``The supermarkets have their customers, and I have mine,'' said Thuy Nga, who has been selling fresh fruit from the same perch for 20 years. ``Supermarkets are for rich people.''
Peaceful coexistence
James Scott, the director of Metro Cash and Carry Vietnam, the country's biggest new Western market, said sellers like Nga are right not to worry about competition from his gargantuan wholesale chain or the retail supermarkets sprouting up in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.
``I suspect that in a place like Vietnam there will always be a traditional sector and a modern sector side by side,'' Scott said, pointing out that traditional markets still flourish elsewhere in Asia even after supermarkets have gained a foothold.
Metro's massive, Costco-style stores cater to wholesale customers. Shoppers must own restaurants or retail shops to get store membership. Once inside, they are bedazzled by aisles stacked with everything from washing machines to Norwegian salmon to Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, known here as Frosties. Some Western products cost the same as in the United States (Frosties, for example), some are more expensive (wine) and others cheaper (Heineken beer).
Concerned that the small farmers and intermediaries who have served traditional Vietnamese markets could eventually be left behind, the Asian Development Bank is looking for ways to help them appeal to modern supermarket chains.
``The demand for quantity and quality tends to favor big, modern farms,'' said Alan Johnson, who is coordinating a bank-financed study of Vietnamese markets. ``If this supermarket phenomenon is inevitable, we want to see if there are things we can do to help small farmers participate in this brave new world.'' Seventy-five percent of Vietnam's workforce earns a living in agriculture.
The government has been cracking down on the small street-side sellers who buy from small farmers, trying to concentrate them in markets like the 1912 so they don't block traffic and create chaos on the streets.
The women who flood the streets with baskets of fruit on their shoulders, giving all of Hanoi the feel of a massive village market, are increasingly harassed by police who shoo them off the sidewalks.
While they lament such practices, even some of Vietnam's traditional sellers see benefits to modern markets.
```I think going to the supermarket is a more civilized way of shopping,'' said Dau thi Hai, who sells chickens, ducks and pigeons at the 1912, where the subtropical heat is often stifling. ``They have air conditioning.''
By Ben Stocking - Mercury News - January 28, 2005.
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