French grocery stores

Some of the grocery stores here:






Here is a list of interesting things I have noticed about French grocery stores:

1. Milk is generally NOT kept in the cold section. It is left in the aisles and stored at room temperature. It also keeps for about a month, which is very odd and makes me a little leary of the milk but I drink it anyway. You can also only really get skim, 2% or whole milk here. 1% does not exist.
2. Tuna is very expensive compared to US prices. A small can of tuna is about $1.50 as opposed to 34-45 cents in the US.
3. Ready-made meals that are not frozen, but microwaveable, not only include the normal stuff like beef or chicken but also RABBIT, DUCK or FISH.
4. Spaghetti-O's do exist here. They are just called something else. But I have had them, cheap and spaghetti-O like.
5. Meat, in general, is very expensive. You can also get, in a normal meat section, duck and rabbit as well as chicken, turkey, pork and beef.
6. Lunch meat is very hard to come by if you don't eat pork products.
7. Pork is a VERY big part of food choices here.
8. Frozen TV dinners do exist here just like the US.
9. The yogurt/pudding selection here is HUGE! It's a whole aisle unto itself.
10. There is a whole aisle normally devoted to wine. Big surprise there, huh? You can also get some pretty good wine for less than 2 Euros.
11. There is a huge selection of hard cider in the alcohol section and very, very little American beer. The selection is mostly what we consider imports (obviously). I haven't even seen Budweiser or Bud Light in the store by my house.
    
12. Most grocery stores do not automatically give you paper nor plastic bags when checking out. You normally have to bring your own or buy them at the cash register. Sometimes you can't even buy them at the cash register, so I hope you came prepared.
13. Many people buy 3 or more baguettes at a time for whatever reason. It's super cheap (about 50 cents) at my grocery stores but it's stale in 24 hours so how much bread are you really eating?
14. There is a pretty big fish selection at most grocery stores and a lot of smoked salmon for lower prices that I am used to. I am taking advantage of that.
15. Bagels pretty much don't exist unless you are in a specialty store. Cream cheese is also pretty hard to come by as well as cottage cheese.
16. Flavored water is gross here. I haven't found any that I could stand. However, bottled water is super cheap if you buy the big bottles. Good thing too since the tap water at my place is so full of calcium, you can see the deposits in the pot if you ever boil water. That really deters me from drinking from the tap.
17. They translate "Mr. Clean" into the French equivalent. That is just hilarious to me. I love seeing English brand names translated for no apparent reason.
18. Cheese is everywhere and abundant but not cheddar cheese or what we consider block cheese. Think of brie and then imagine brie had 20 sisters and brothers. It's everywhere here and it's an epidemic.
19. Aisles are very narrow and grocery stores in general are pretty small in comparison to US stores. Many of the baskets on wheels (grocery carts are hard to come by) are a little too wide for the aisle and someone next to you. So you have to really pay attention when dragging your little basket behind you.