GROCERY SHOPPING abroad in the Netherlands as an American

hi everyone i'm ava and i'm an american living in the netherlands i've actually lived here for a little over a year and a half now and i've been making videos for about a year about my life here in the netherlands and what i don't know is why i haven't made a video yet about grocery shopping i feel like i've alluded to it a lot in my videos where i'm kind of going grocery shopping to pick something but i've never really talked about what it's like when you do that in another country because if you've moved abroad or even if you've traveled somewhere to a different country where they speak a different language you might have noticed that grocery shopping is a fun experience it can be intriguing insightful into a different culture and it can also be downright frustrating so today i wanted to share some of my grocery shopping experiences with you in the netherlands like what were some of the challenges some of the obstacles i overcame wow this is sounding more and more dramatic as i go what were the little hiccups that i had when i first started grocery shopping here in this lovely foreign country um what were the things that stood out to me and still stand out to me and then what are some of the differences i've noticed when i compare the grocery shopping culture but also just supermarkets in the netherlands and the us anyway you know what that was enough of an introduction let's get into the actual video so i actually wanted to start with what it was like for me when i first moved to the netherlands and when i initially started grocery shopping abroad and i know it sounds a bit dramatized to say oh my god they were hiccups it was challenging but honestly because grocery shopping is such a regular part of life it can be extremely frustrating when you move abroad as a 26 year old adult and realize that you can't do something that you should have learned when you were 10 or younger so bear with me here what i talk about these little hiccups so starting with hiccup number one is turns out you can't just guess what the food product is by looking at it if you don't speak the language fluently or at least at an advanced level um i must have bought like the wrong type of cream three times it's not an exaggeration that's when i learned the difference between and in the netherlands which means whipped cream or whippable cream i also wonder if this is something that happens in other countries because as a side note i actually think this is pretty funny so my girlfriend who is dutch when she moved to the us which is where we met and we've been together over five years now it's actually quite some time anyway that's not what the wood video is about but when she moved to the us as a new bright-eyed duchy and she went to the grocery store she bought half and half for milk so that's what she would use the first few months in that in the u.s she used half and half in her coffee and so on um and i understand where she was coming from because in the netherlands you can buy half full of milk which is milk with half the fat in it half and half is not half full of milk half and half is half whole milk and half light cream so when she was going milk in america is so delicious it was because she was literally putting cream in everything which is fine but i think she was a bit horrified to discover like that's how she had cereal and so on i can see that that's a bit much the other thing that's of course tricky is where do you find the food items in the supermarket now if you've just lived in the netherlands your whole life you just know where to find things like what goes with what but when i moved here i was like where are the tortillas that was a random example but honestly i for instance did not know where to find eggs because in the u.s the eggs are always in the dairy section i don't know why the eggs are in the dairy section but the point is that they are in the u.s so i went in to the supermarkets here fully fully expected to find my eggs in the dairy section i i just couldn't find them um and then i kind of like went around circles in a supermarket and you know what if you've been wandering around the supermarket in circles for like an hour even someone as serene and relaxed as i am will get flustered i am not serene and relaxed half the time but you get flustered and then you just think you know what i could do without the eggs something embarrassing that i'm going to admit to you all is that for a long time until pretty recently okay until last week i used to think wouldn't it be really convenient if the isles in the netherlands like actually had like labels on top about what was in the aisle and then it turns out they did have these just been here the whole time oh my god seriously they had these labels there all along they just aren't as big and like in your face as they are in the u.s so i discovered that last week it would have been really really convenient to have had to have known that those labels were there back you know a year and a half ago when i was confused wandering around the store anyway enough about that oh the final thing i wanted to mention actually and i've said this a few times before but it is really a problem for people who move to the netherlands and that is that we often do not have a dutch bank card if you have just moved here it takes a month or two at least before you can get a bsn before you can get an address and then you can get your bank card uh your pin bus so that you can use your dutch big bus at the supermarket if you have just lived in netherlands you have probably never encountered this problem but then you have to pay in cash and that is really difficult because you kind of hold up the line no one pays the cash anymore and honestly you may not even know that your cards from back home don't work and so you're trying to use those cards and everything's going wrong and then you know you're an adult who thinks why isn't this working out the way it should recently i've actually heard many expats who have just moved here a couple of months ago complained to me about this and they're like you won't believe what happened to me um i feel so embarrassed i'm the only one who's ever done this and i have to reassure them oh no this is a thing that when you move here you cannot use your card at the overtime or like the atos but it's less of a problem at the atos because well you don't have a line of angry shoppers waiting to just you know go through and then there's you like why doesn't my card work well anyway talked about this before it's a bit it's quite annoying a quick note here i do talk a lot about the albert hind because that is my primary go-to supermarket but i have gone to other supermarkets and i go to other supermarkets like when i first moved and this was in amsterdam i would also go to dirk vondenbruck which is also when i thought to myself why is it that these supermarkets in netherlands are just named after people that is the least creative thing you could do okay so not to brag now but after a year and a half of grocery shopping here i am a pro just kidding well as much of a pro as i ever will be grocery shopping ever as a chore but speaking of grocery shopping as a tour i actually don't view grocery shopping to be that arduous here in the netherlands because it's just a really efficient and honestly pleasant experience like first of all in the us you walk into a grocery store and it's always cold doesn't matter what time of year you're always cold or uncomfortable uh maybe when it's really hot outside and you walk in for those five glorious seconds you're like ah relief and then you proceed to freeze immediately whereas here i've always found the temperature's pretty okay maybe it's still not perfect but relatively better but the other thing that i really enjoy is that things are organized really clearly and they're labeled really clearly that and they're also not too many choices now at first the not too many choices may sound like a bad thing like why don't you have more choices to you know things to choose from here but honestly there's also the very much the paradox of choice in the u.s where you're standing there looking at six different types of tuna i don't buy tuna so i don't know why i came up with this example but like pick anything like six twelve different types of tomato sauce literally anything and then you have to stand there picking between the best so here honestly the fact that they're just a few pre-selected products makes life pretty easy i do wish the albert hine i went to carried more than one type of tofu but hey i accept it because overall it's fine in the u.s comparing between items that seemingly just have a different cover can be time consuming whereas here that's not the case except if you're trying to pick between what goes on your bread oh my god all of the options and if you're trying to buy cheese they're like up to three different sections huge sections for cheese in this small supermarket it blows my mind am i complaining about that no because if i had to have the paradox of choice dilemma happen anywhere or for anything that would be for cheese so definitely lucked out on that one and speaking of things being labeled clearly one example that i really like at the albert hein is they have this price favorite label which is basically the product that gets you the biggest bang for your buck or like a big bang for your buck relatively speaking another thing that makes grocery shopping pretty easy here is that you have a lot of self checkout counters in many of the grocery stores so not just at the big grocery stores like the albert tine which is a huge chain but also at some of the smaller stores i've seen self checkout counters that really just go hand in hand with this idea that okay if you were gonna go grocery shopping how can we make this really efficient how can we make this a less you know intense intensive process for you so that you can just go into the store you know swift through the aisles pick what you need to get and then just pay and quickly exit um because of this i think a lot of the times in netherlands people will go grocery shopping more frequently and pick up lesser items so i know tons of people who go almost every day or every other day in the u.s what was more normal from my perspective was that you would go once or twice a week and then you would just load everything up people with cars would go with their cars so that they could just stuff their cars with food items and then they wouldn't need to go for a week or two here's a fun fact in the us i've lived in several cities and in the several cities i've gone to several supermarkets big and small and my favorite supermarket that i ever went to was giant heirloom and i loved grocery shopping there because it was really organized there were lots of self-checkout counters and so on and it was just everything felt really easy and the prices were also not too bad it's like this is this is a great experience and then turns out that it is owned by the same company that owns albert hyde what are the odds so in the netherlands grocery shopping is extremely organized and efficient except the aldi i don't know what's going on there but anyway the aldi's a perfectly fine place to shop i go there too sometimes it just stands out another reason why i don't feel like grocery shopping is such a big chore here is because it kind of fills me with warmth and coziness every time i walk into a supermarket why is that it's because there's often this little coffee cart or a little food stall right outside the supermarket or as part of the supermarket where you can just grab a cup of coffee or a little snack oftentimes it's free or at least sometimes i've seen it been you know be free but many of these times you have these little coffee carts where you can get snacks and it just smells of coffee so every time i go in i feel a bit happy because it's warm and it smells nice and i think of nice things when i think of coffee and so i walk in in a great mood and i'm all ready to shop so that is a great trick these supermarkets are using but i love it it i also think speaks a little bit to the dutch zelekai culture where you just want everything to be a nice pleasant experience now when it comes to differences between grocery shopping in the us and the netherlands i've already mentioned and intertwined some of the differences as i went through the video but one of the things i wanted to mention was how expensive it can be to grocery shop in the u.s many of you have commented that you maybe haven't noticed your difference and while that could be true because you could take some of the more expensive supermarkets and netherlands and some of the more cheaper ones in the us and there you wouldn't see too much of a price difference but overall generally speaking they're just many of these stores that are built around the idea of you can buy fancy wholesome food products for an extremely high price and that is fine it's like the echo plaza here in the netherlands you can go to whole foods in the u.s or trader joe's and there it's very expensive now the problem is when even the mid-range or cheaper supermarkets have certain products that i would say are not affordable for the average person in the u.s so why does bread need to start at two dollars fifty or three dollars for for the cheapest bread maybe you can get something for two dollars but here in the netherlands if i'm buying two dollar bread i'm buying the nicer bread two dollar bread two euro bread i'm buying the nicer bread it can be quite expensive to the point that i often had friends say things like well i'm not gonna go grocery shopping and i'm just gonna get takeout because honestly the meal i was planning on making would amount to the same as ordering food so i'm just gonna do that i can't imagine people saying that here so that's when i really see the difference and the note i wanted to end on today was stamps because i feel like this stamp collection thing that happens in dutch supermarkets is a very very dutch thing this is what i mean by it's insightful into dutch culture okay so when you go grocery shopping at a supermarket the supermarket could be running a deal where if you go there and you shop for x amount like 10 euros or something then you can collect a stamp and you can collect these stamps and then at the end of a certain period or whenever you have enough stamps you could buy like wine glasses or a pan or something like that like a product for a low price or for the equivalent of x-mini stamps isn't that great but i feel like that's so dutch like ooh i'm gonna collect these stamps so that i can save them and then buy this thing i mean we have coupon clippers in the u.s but here i don't know something about like the collecting stamps i've also seen that with the dao edwards coffee like you collect the points that are on there so i feel like this collecting thing to buy something is a very dutch thing and i really enjoy seeing that at a supermarket i have not seen that at a u.s supermarket but if you have let me know in the comments down below that was what i wanted to share with you today about my grocery shopping experience here in the netherlands as an american i'm curious to hear your thoughts as always feel free to drop a comment down below i always read them i look forward to reading them and until next time

Channel: Dutch Americano

Views: 42,017

Keywords: grocery shopping abroad, american in the netherlands, Dutch supermarkets, supermarkets in the Netherlands, life in the Netherlands, American expat in the Netherlands, moving abroad to the Netherlands, grocery shopping in the Netherlands, Dutch grocery stores, Dutch stores

Id: t6eBK9ZixXo

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021