Grocery shopping Walmart Style

Carre Four is to Taiwan as Walmart is to the states.  It is a department store/hardware store/drugstore/grocery store combination that offers a wide variety of products to its customers.   Acquiring a cart is of interest.  The carts are chained together and to release one you put a ten dollar coin (30 cents US) deposit into a lock on the handle of the cart.  You walk around with your cart with the coin in the slot.  When you return the cart and chain it back with the others, the coin is released and you get your ten dollars back.  I think I prefer this to the long pole on the Ross Department Store carts. 

A curious observation:  Why are products made in China/Taiwan more expensive there than they are in the states?  Walking through the electronics section and comparing prices on cameras, we noticed that they tended to be more expensive.  The same could be seen in laptops and cell phones. 

In a city of roughly three million people with space at a premium, one thing we noticed was that appliances tended to be downsized.   Refrigerators, washers, and dryers were somewhat smaller in size than what we have in the states.  A dryer is considered a luxury and not very common.  Most people hang their clothes out to dry...although the humidity makes this almost impossible to accomplish.

American brands of food and sundry items can be found on the shelves side by side with local brands.  Some packages have English labels to identify their products and others you just have to guess by the cover and/or picture.  Vegetables and fruit are somewhat similar and easy to make out.  Meat is also easily identifiable.  But there are some items in both that are not common in the states.   One of these is the black chicken in the picture on the right.  The meat is actually black. 

Groceries bagged we hailed a taxi and headed back home.