Shopping in Tenerife

My local store here in El Palmar, with its home delivery service and being almost unique in the fact that they open on Saturday afternoons, is one of the most shopper-friendly of it's type.

Beyond that, I couldn't help but laugh loudly with recognition at many of the things that Leslie has observed about the often frustrating Canarian shopping experience in this article.

Suggesting that, "Canarian shopkeepers don’t enjoy over contamination of customers.", because it creates them work, Leslie says, "Generally speaking, the older the area, the more entrenched is this attitude. Such shops have become rare in the tourist dominated south, but are still common in the north." Barring those couple of exceptions of unusual forward thinking mentioned above, I can certainly confirm this.

In all fairness, they work very hard to be helpful and will get almost anything a customer wants at Las Cuevas, so long as their warehouse carries it, but this is rare. So far though, they don't stock such "modern" items as a can of baked beans.

And, half the things you want have to be served and you have to ask for them - even a simple thing like potatoes. You can guarantee that in the time it takes them to go off out the back to get them, been stopped on the way to be told the latest news about poor old Sra. Perez' bad foot and served three other customers, the spuds will have grown eyes! :)

If three customers is overload, wait until you get three customers and a delivery man in all at once!

There have been times when it got so out of hand, that I just go behind the counter and start weighing, pricing and serving customers myself and I am highly honoured that they trust me - a foreigner - to do so and, at least things are better since they moved to new premises a couple of years ago. There are some open shelves now and their time is no longer shared between the shop out front and a drinking bar in the back room.

Don't get me wrong, I love going to Las Cuevas for a chat, to catch up on all the local news and gossip, etc., as much as the next person, but there's a limit. The truth is that I never call in if I'm in a hurry. It's futile. The event must be planned as a minimum half-day excursion. It's like going to a club or day-center that happens to sell things on the side.

I really wouldn't want to change anything about it, but, of course, it does mean that I only call in there once a month or so to replenish fresh produce. Like everyone else on these islands, I do bulk shopping trips to one of the big malls that offer prices, choice and opening times to suit me.

Go down to Buenavista and you are back to the old system: after 1 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, it's a ghost town.

The only shop that opens all day Saturday and all day Sunday is the bakery, Pastelería Aderno. They do a roaring trade.

They also own a bodega and the company has just opened a refurbished finca as rural tourist accommodation. You would think that other local business owners might grasp that their results just might be tied into their efforts, wouldn't you?

Buenavista del Norte is hardly a tourist hot spot, but it does attract a few and more all the time now we have Buenavista Golf, designed by the great Severiano Ballesteros, so there must be people wandering around there wondering what to do.

While my mother was here at Christmas, we discussed the idea of going to Santa Cruz, but in the end decided that it was just too much trouble to get up before dawn to get there and have enough time in the shops before they closed at lunch time.

For the capital city of an island dependent on tourism and a major port, the attitude of retailers in Santa Cruz is something that I just can't understand. As Tenerife News say, in Ghost town cruise blues, "How much sympathy do whingeing retailers deserve when they refuse to move with the times?"