French Supermarkets

Well, here is my first "rant" about how different things are in France compared to the UK!

Supermarkets! You may think, Oh French supermarkets are amazing, the fruit and veg are so fresh, big and ripe, the supermarkets are enormous and there are lots of them, they have such delicious food...
Bien sur, all of the above is true....

However, I'm also going to tell you exactly what is wrong with French supermarkets!

The trolleys!!! I have a choice of 4 very large and 2 medium supermarkets within a 10 min drive of my house, I am absolutely spoiled for choice, and I have now tested them all!
NONE of them have a trolley with a baby seat AND a child seat together (as my local Sainsburys, Asda and Tesco all did back in the UK), so OK I can't take both children shopping on my own. I refuse to have Laila walk as it would take me 5 times as long, and Max isn't big enough to sit in the child seat yet. Anyway she LOVES riding in trolleys!!

So if I can't take both children shopping, I will just go when I have one of them as Francois has been here to look after the other one, once Laila is at school its Max that I'll have with me. So I visited 2 very large supermarkets on Tuesday morning (Leclerc & Geant), neither of them do trolleys with a reclining baby seat in them or even one of those with a top tray for you to put the car seat directly onto. These trolleys are annoying because when you're as short as me you can't see where you're going with the car seat blocking your view, but I would have settled for it if it was my only option!
So in both supermarkets I got as far as the customer service desk on my hunt for said trolley, both told me "desolee, on ne fait pas ca", "sorry we don't do that". But it was a "French" sorry, where they're not sorry at all and look at you as if you are crazy for even thinking they might!!
So off I went to an Intermarche, where I found ONE trolley with a reclining baby seat in it, this supermarket was in the middle of a big revamp, so the aisles were half empty as they were being moved around but I did not complain, I had my trolley and could finally buy some food!

By the way, if any of you are wondering why I couldn't have Max in the sling or his pushchair, its just not possible to push a pushchair and a trolley, and he's such a big baby its not possible to pick anything heavy up off the shelves and reach into the trolley with him blocking the way! Plus he likes to hold my finger when he's in the sling and that can pose quite a problem too as he has an iron grip!


Online food shopping is only just appearing here, and the large Intermarche that I went to apparently does it AND delivers, yes this is quite novel over here! There are some where you can order online and go and collect it yourself, this could also be an option I suppose.

I don't know what I'm going to do in the next few weeks when Francois is at work and Laila's not started school yet, I will either have to wait for the weekend or go in the evening once the children are in bed. But I don't think they even open very late here, only till 8pm so that doesn't give me enough time?

What do French mums do??? It shall be my mission to find out!