Egypt, 2024 - Convenience Stores are Proliferating

When we first moved into our apartment here in Cairo sixteen years ago, we had a limited number of nearby options for grocery shopping.  The whole neighborhood had been created from farmland at the same time as the Ring Road was rising on pylons in front of us.

 

Our only nearby grocer was a convenience store about two hundred yards down our block.  We refer to it as the "Lebanese store."  It's still in business. Here, Linda walks in to pick up a couple of items last month.

Notice that there is an adjoining fruit and vegetable store with a limited selection of items.

We live on a long, long, but skinny, block full of high-rise apartment buildings adjacent to the Ring Road surrounding Cairo.  It's over a mile walk to circle our block.  Besides convenience stores, the block holds furniture stores, a couple of car dealers, car repair shops, a Michelin Tire store, a mattress shop, two coffee shops, a lighting store, a swimming pool supply store, three pharmacies, a pizza shop, a fast-food Koshary shop, a fast-food falafel shop, a large Chinese restaurant, a gas station, three small mansions/large private homes and two mosques.  

Did I mention the huge Golden Eagle tourist shop selling perfume, papyrus and other souvenirs and which might have as many as ten buses parked out front at times?  (follow that link and read the reviews before you shop!)

 

And we shouldn't forget the Vodafone store, juice bar, nut store, gymnasium and Syrian sandwich shop at the end of the block!  

  

As this commercial area began to develop a dozen years ago, we were fortunate to have a Ragab Sons supermarket open up in a new building just around the corner at the end of the block.   It filled most of the street level floor with a mixture of food and merchandise.

 

This became our favorite convenient place to shop for meat, frozen or canned goods, butter, flour, sugar, etc.  In this 2016 blog post, Linda is shown at the butcher/deli counter loading up. 

Alas, all of the Ragab Sons stores closed a couple of years ago.  It isn't clear just what happened.  Competition, bankruptcy, bad management, sins against the state?  There is supposed to be an auction of assets this year - but it is one of those moving targets frequently encountered here.  The door has been sealed up and the space vacant for the past two years.  Once boasting over 5,000 employees, only their website remains.

But with Ragab Sons gone, we now have six, going on seven, small convenience stores open on the block. We can buy eggs and candy bars at any of them - but diet Coke or Pepsi Lite at none (well, actually, Pepsi Lite is sometimes available at one.)  Here are the new shops with a guide to their location.

El Coptan is not the most attractive of our neighborhood shops.  But the stock of chips, candy and ice cream is the best on the block.  The location next to ZinZinia coffee shop likely makes it quite profitable and the staff is cheerful.  "Coptan" is sometimes used as a title of respect here and the name appears on other stores - possibly named for the wandering character in this movie.

 

Kazyon is a branch of  a 600-store chain rapidly growing across Egypt.  Clean and tidy.  Bar code scanners and receipts!  They have a respectable looking line of products.

 

Another modern, neat and tidy chain is BIM, which reportedly operates 300 stores in Egypt and over 600 in Morocco.  Probably the largest of our mini-supermarkets, BIM has entrances on both sides of the block, offering us a shortcut through the block;  this is attractive to us since all of the vacant lots we used to use as shortcuts have now been filled with high-rise structures.  (Our building has no rear entrance to the street behind us.)   

 

Another old-style, open front convenience store.  A reliable source for a 12-pack box of 1.5 liter bottles of water.

 

A tiny market but has the advantage of being at the end of the block and closest market to the two largest residential buildings as well as near the second coffee shop on the corner. 

 

And here is the newest entrant.  El Coptan Market 2!  Sister store to the El Coptan shown in the first photo but much better dressed!  This one isn't quite open yet.  That surprised me since it was open late at night when we arrived in January.  I bought eggs, something resembling sausage and a case of water at 3 a.m.  When open, this will be our closest market and may tempt our loyalty to "the Lebanese store."

  

 Here are all seven store placed in order on a Google map