Strange Things Are Afoot At the Circle-K

One thing that we are working on adjusting to is the absence of large grocery stores in our area of London. The main chain in the city is Tesco, and they are everywhere, sort of. You see, there are tiers of Tesco.

Everywhere you go, you see a Tesco Express. These have a little bit more than what a 7-eleven might have in the US, though not by much. They have 1-2 brands of the basics, with a focus on convenience foods. They do have a surprisingly decent fresh bakery section, which I assume that is brought in throughout the day. They have a very small selection of produce. They have one brand of litter, non-clumping.

A step up from the express is the Tesco Metro. These are less common, and bigger. They have a larger produce area, which has what must be the basics for the area. We were surprised to find no cooking greens at all (no chard, no kale) at ours, but they did have some exotic-looking-to-me stuff (rapini, some Asian ingredients I did not recognize.) They also have more basic ingredients, though those are mixed in with a large number of convenience items still. More brand selection starts rearing its head here: There were two brands of litter, both non-clumping.

I am told that if you venture outside the city that you might encounter a vanilla Tesco, or even that mythical beast the Tesco Superstore. We have not been to either of these just yet, though we have gone to a Waitrose which seems to be larger than a metro but smaller than what I would expect from a full-sized store. The Waitrose is apparently both fancy and schmancy, based on people's reactions to my saying that we had shopped there. It did have much more of a selection than our local Tescos, and you could tell it was aiming for higher end. It has fancier convenience foods (frozen pizzas with all kinds of exotic ingredients, for example) and a decent brand selection. Waitrose, finally, had clumping litter (though only store brand.)

A curious side-effect of doing our shopping at this series of ever growing, but never large, stores is that we are having some troubles acclimating to the grocery culture. For example, we were at the Tesco Metro, looking for chicken stock. This is a pretty common ingredient in the US, and something that we use in many, many dishes (probably more than half.) We had looked at the express and had no luck. Then we went to the Metro and started searching through the aisles. We got well past where we would find it in the US, and still had no luck. I eventually went back and asked a worker, but it wasn't clear he knew what I was talking about. He pointed out some cans of chicken gravy, and I stumbled my way from there to bullion cubes, which were close enough. The real problem with being in these small stores though, is this central conundrum: Does this item not exist in the UK, or does this item not exist in this store? In a larger supermarket, I could more accurately make that judgement, but with this series of smaller stores it's much harder to know if I should hold on to hope or adjust my expectations from life.

Update! Since starting the draft of this post, we made it out to a Tesco Superstore. I have apparently become more acclimated to local custom than I realized, because when we walked in I actually gasped aloud, "So big! So much stuff!" This fella was larger than a normal US grocery, and had home and office goods as well. What was odd (and probably representative of the culture) is that while the store was much larger and had many more items, it didn't necessarily have more brand variety for each individual item. We did verify that they did not have cans of chicken stock, so that's just not a thing. Oddly they did not have clumping cat litter, so we apparently need to aim for a middle-sized store for that. Very odd.