A Shopping Trip to Carrefour

Yesterday we headed across the river to the City Center shopping mall in Maadi.  We do this about once a month to stock up on food at low prices and buy items that are hard to find in the neighborhood.  Maadi is the district of Cairo favored by diplomats and other ex-pats who don't want to immerse themselves too deeply into Egyptian life.

Carrefour, you may recall, is the giant French retailer second in size only to WalMart.  The entire month of January is devoted to their annual Egyptian anniversary sale - this year being the fourteenth of these.  The stores are crowded and we noticed security was enhanced as well.  This local blogger covered the crowd scene quite well and you might want to follow the link to look at her pictures.

The Carrefour anniversary flyer featured flat-screen TVs on the cover with the 40 inch sets going for about $230.  There were quite a few of these that we saw going out the door in shopping carts while we lunched at Chili's restaurant near the mall entrance.

But the big seller, it appeared, was an item from this page of the flyer:


Electric water heaters.  That 55 litre water heater was going into carts so fast that the merchanidsers couldn't get them out onto the floor.  People were waiting by the stockroom door to grab them off the pallets as they came by.

Here are four of them that I photographed in rapid succession in the vegetable section.


Perhaps the $34 price was just to low to resist?