France Tales

I noticed today that some stores had their sales signs up in Toulouse. Some of you may know that in France stores are only allowed to have sales 2 times per year. Once in the winter and once in the summer. I wrote a post about it in the winter that generated quite a response. Read it here.

I didn’t see the signs in all the stores so I guess some have tried to begin again early. There were a few stores that tried this last year and they got fined. Yes you can get fined if you start your sales early. There are pros and cons to this method but after being here for nearly a year I think it probably hurts small businesses more than it helps them, even though the French claim it protects small businesses. I found this interesting opinion on another site:
http://www.discoverfrance.com/france_travel_info/Soldes.htm

No time for the January blues to set in once the end-of-year holiday festivities have drawn to a close. In Paris, the sales season known simply as “les soldes” will be inaugurated on January 10 and you can be sure eager shoppers will be lined up in the Paris drizzle waiting to rush their favorite department store. What makes this French version of the after-Christmas sale so special? For one thing, sale events in France don’t crop up at each holiday occasion, but instead get concentrated into a month in winter (”soldes d’hiver”) and the better part of the month of July (”soldes d’été”). While some stores will run promotions at other times of the year, the word sale is not allowed into the French retail lexicon outside of these two defined periods, under threat of fine from governmental authorities. Most UK and US visitors shake their head in disbelief at the thought that Big Brother is meddling in everyday mercantile exchanges for items that remain in the realm of garments and household appliances. Yet, a State agency, with a name that goes something like General Directorate for Fair Trading, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control, is empowered to monitor that all shopkeepers and retailers strictly abide by these measures and it’s up to the local prefects to decide on which date the sales must cease and how deep the discount can actually be, whether 30, 40 or 50% off. So much for the free market… You may think that all these shopping rules and regulations are in place out of a genuine, although overly-authoritarian, concern to protect the consumer, yet in reality France’s read on consumerism is to make sure that luring customers does not breed disloyal competition to the detriment of smaller boutiques and shops. This governmental protection of the retailer goes hand in hand with legislation designed to safeguard small independent manufacturers and agricultural producers, both of whom provide a tremendous source of France’s economic prestige. So some advice to American visitors is to stop shaking your head, embrace this everlasting French tradition and treat yourselves to the experience of “les grands magasins”…

Our friends Alessandro and Stefano told us about callingcards.com. You can purchase a calling card online. You don’t actually get a card but you get an email that gives you the access number to call and the pin number so you can call internationally. The rates are excellent. We had a card to call from the US to France before we moved and we paid 1.9 cents per minute. We have one now to call from France to the US and we pay 2.9 cents per minute.

You can buy them in denominations of $10, $20, $50 for sure and probably even higher if you need to. They are great because if you have a cell phone that cannot call internationally or you don’t want to pay the rates your carrier charges, you can use the cards because the access numbers are local. Check them out so you can call us day and night, just don’t forget the time difference.

A funny thing happened at the store. Well it actually happened in the shower, the funny part. Jean-Jacques, Copper, and I went to LidL in Le Bugue. It is a sort of discount store with damaged goods, no jokes please. Brand name things but slight damaged at discount prices. I think, maybe there is more to the store. We were looking for shampoo and liquid body soap, among other things. We found some inexpensive stuff that looked like it would be pretty good.

The next morning in the shower, who am I fooling, it was afternoon, I am jetlagged after all, I was happily washing my hair. Then I squeezed some soap out of the tube on my washcloth to wash my body. I thought it was strange that it didn’t lather up well. I put more on the washcloth. Still no lather. I thought, boy the water here in Le Buisson sure is hard. I’ve heard that hard water doesn’t lather but what do I know. I put still more soap on the wash cloth. Then I thought, read the bottle, you can read French. Lotion de corps, it was not liquid body soap but simply lotion and I had heaped it on a washcloth and covered every inch of my body by now.

Standing in the shower I was afraid to move because I was like a wet slippery seal. Carefully I used the shampoo, yes that was shampoo, to scrub the lotion off my skin. When it was safe to move I hopped out of the tub, got dressed, and felt my oh so smooth skin under my clothes. I guess it could have been worse.