It took me a while but I finally realised that the Seoul retail scene is dominated by “high street” style shops rather than shopping centres and that while there are a few (proper) departmental stores around (e.g. Lotte, Shinsegae and Hyundai) most indoor shopping venues are not shopping centres as we know it elsewhere. Instead they are either small-ish buildings housing small independent retailers (e.g. Migliore) or small-ish buildings housing a variety of chain stores laid-out in such a way as to look like it was a departmental store. You might say that the level of retailing is not very sophisticated around here, or that they are just “different”!

Given the size of the city, I have been very surprised at the relative absence of supermarkets. They are not as abundant as I would expect, or perhaps I am not looking in the right places. Instead, the city seems to thrive on local convenience stores, more so than Sydney. You’ll find one every few metres in a busy area. While they do charge a premium over the prices you’d get in a supermarket, it is relatively small - perhaps 10% - compared to the premium one pays in convenience stores in Sydney.

In my early days in Seoul, I was rather impressed at what I then thought were practices motivated by environmental-friendliness. Supermarkets charge 50 won for each plastic that is dispensed and cafes charge 50 won for take-away, or rather take-out, paper cups [if you bring the used cups back to the counter, you get your 50 won back]. And then I notice/realised that they use a lot of packaging in their food: biscuits and snacks are all individually packed, i.e. not two, not three, not five but ONE cookie in each aluminium foil pack. Drinks are sold in small single serve portions - bulk sizes are not common. This, thus, led me to conclude that if the Koreans were seriously concerned about the environment, they should first do away with all the packaging that is use in their consumables - it would do a lot more for the environment than merely minimising the use of plastic bags.

At some point, I noticed that in self-served cafes and restaurants, you were expected to not just bring the tray to a central collection area but you were also expected to separate your refuse to the n-th degree - this involves putting straws in one container, paper cups were to be stacked in a corner, other plastics in a bin and general refuse in another bin. It eventually dawned on me that businesses are motivated more by minimising operating costs than saving the environment, if at all the latter. There is certainly profit to be made by charging each customer 50 won per bag or per paper cup but more than that, all this separation of refuse probably enables businesses to sell recyclable material and thus make yet more money! They might not be able to sell a pile of mixed up thrash but those that have been separated certainly has the potential to generate extra income and all the better when you can get customers to do the nasty work of separating them - for free!

I have also not been impressed with the use of heating in Seoul - Koreans are heat-freaks! You really have to be prepared to strip when you go out. In general, they overheat the indoors - it may be 20C outside but the heaters are on full blast and it’s a balmy, tropical 28C indoors. Bizarrely, or maybe not, the Koreans themselves don’t seem to understand “hot” - temperatures have been cool but they have barely gone below 15C much in the last couple of weeks and yet the turtle-necks and heavy winter coats are already out. I tell you, they are freaks - but I knew that already… and let us not recount the oh so many ways!

Posted on October 27th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Fieldwork