I like many things about the way you buy things here in Mexico…whole stores for buttons, or screws, or rope or whatever.  The mercado.  The many interesting stores that have a little of everything in a jumble.  I can buy pretty much anything I need within a few blocks of my house.  But sometimes you can search and search for something that seems pretty basic, too.  I never know what to expect!

Our cordless phone that we use for Vonage has been slowly failing, and now will only hold a charge for about 15 minutes.  And for the last couple of minutes it beeps annoyingly – so it was time for a new phone. We have been all over town this week, looking.

• Sam’s Club.  Only one model, with a single handset.  We want one extension.
• Office Depot.  A couple models, both out of stock.
• Office Max.  No.
  
• Soriana.  No.
• Fabricas de Francia.  Two models with a single handset.
• Electra.  No.
• Wal-Mart.  One model, all boxes had been opened and the contents scattered about.
• Home Depot.  One model, in the box, unopened, GOAL!

Isn’t it strange sometimes how many places you have to look for something that doesn’t seem so exotic?  Or maybe a land-line style phone is exotic, with people using cell phones so much now.

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Friday we went to Wal-Mart to get some groceries and look for the phone.  We used to like to shop there – they had decent fruits and vegetables and carried a few things we appreciated like tonic water and Eggos.  But we hate it now.  The meat department smelled terrible, the stock was disorganized, and they were out of most things we wanted.  There were only a couple of checkout lines open, with a half dozen families queued up ahead of us.  It was beyond ugly.  We are die hard Mega fans now!

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There’s a lot of sexism in retail here, too.  If you go to the appliance or furniture section of a department store, you’ll see lots of employees on the floor, mostly women, but some men.  The women can look things up in catalogs and tell basic information, but it seems that only men can actually write up the order, check for availability, or look up your order to tell you its arrival time.

I can’t tell you how shocked I was when I realized that was the system.  I’m still in shock about it.  It is so unfair.  Not just to the women, but to the customers who have to stand around with a handful of women employees waiting for the man to come back so he can ask the computer when something will be scheduled for delivery.  I had to give myself a talking-to about this…that they are probably happy to have the job, that the Mexican machismo is still alive and well, and all of that.  But I can’t help but put myself in their shoes, having “you are not smart enough to do that job” reinforced over and over every day as I watched the man enter a few easy keystrokes in the computer while he (probably) got paid more than me.  I guess I’ll get off my soapbox now.

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