blacklisted:

Carrefour, the hypermarket chain, is huge in Egypt. Huge. There is no Costco or Walmart in Egypt, and Carrefour is probably the closest thing to it. Slightly lower prices than the average retailer, not exactly bulk, but it’s one of those everything stores that has groceries, clothes, appliances, electronics, toys, books, linens, furniture and constant sales and promotions and vouchers and all that other obnoxiously over-promoted shit.

Do you remember the first time your dad went to Costco/Price Club? He probably came back doing the dad equivalent of how a happy puppy acts while being shown the treat he will be rewarded with if he sits on command. My dad never lost that after his first time; he has nurtured a deep love for Costco that has never grown complacent. It is his Disneyland. His crack. He comes back from a trip to Costco and talks about the events of the trip as though it was a trip to Rio.

Carrefour in Egypt on a Thursday night is like 7000 of my dad were released into a Costco, with everyone they have ever spawned, every person with whom they spawned, everyone related to the person with whom they spawned, every friend of the every person related to the person with whom they spawned, and the majority of each party are consistently under the age of five.

Children screaming, babies crying, body heat, being pushed around by people’s carts, long unmoving lines, constant announcements of sale items over the PA system, bum rushes toward those sale items as if they’re being given away for fucking free, it is without at doubt the closest thing to hell I have ever experienced.

And people are so fucking happy to be there. Surrounded by the tribe that is their family, children are handed groceries that will be purchased to eat while sitting inside the shopping carts, but for some reason they continue to scream anyway. Then the hurried, competitive, power-shopping parents or some other adult from the clan screams at the kid to stop screaming, and that gets the damn thing all worked up and then it screams all the more.

Items that were once arranged on shelves are splayed out all over the floor like peasant victims in a Viking-pillaged village. Shelves are gutted for all they were ever worth.

Although children finish consuming some food items before they even make it to the registers, and families are essentially paying for food wrappers, they still manage to fill about three or four separate shopping carts with queue-clogging loot.

My problem with Carrefour is that I forget that it is like this. Maybe my sub-conscious has found a way to block the memory of it. I think, “I need a shower curtain. Carrefour has such good deals. I will go there!”

This is a mistake. It is just not worth it. You have to weigh the amount of your life you’re going to lose inside Carrefour against the slightly larger amount of money you will spend buying the same item elsewhere. You have to think: “I can get a good deal on this shower curtain, but is it worth 2% of my mortal soul?” I am not just talking about the amount of time you will lose pushing through the crowd and waiting in line to pay. I am also talking about what happens physically to the human body after just being inside Carrefour.

Imagine smoking a couple of cigarettes. If you are otherwise healthy, you probably won’t die from smoking just a couple, but it’s also still not the healthiest thing to do. Your heart rate and blood pressure might increase, you might get a coated tongue or acidic stomach, and perhaps the smell will linger with you for a while. If you smoke more frequently, you might consider the long-term effects to your health.

But now imagine the shock to your body if you suddenly go from never smoking to smoking eleven packs a day for a solid decade. The outside of your body would probably start to resemble those pictures which anti-smoking campaigns distribute of the charred insides of people’s bodies who smoked much less than that.

If you consider the Carrefour equivalent to this for the average shopper searching for the basic necessities (ie. is not a member of one of these hunger-driven power-shopping families), immersing yourself in all the possible bodily fluids that may come from horrible, sticky children, soaking up the diabolical aura of those who calculatedly thought it was a good idea to bring them into the world, inhaling the vile stench of feverish consumerism at its most arbitrary and savage, and having that flow through your body and brain as it becomes a part of you…might make you ill.

It made me ill. I can vaguely remember an occasion where I thought I needed something from Carrefour, and before I could even get my bearings, my walk became more of a trudge. I just couldn’t go. Besides the immediate sensory overload, I really can’t describe what led to this because I just can’t remember.

After I reached the point that I could not see in front of me, the crowd and its shopping carts coincidentally knocked me about toward the general direction of a Carrefour worker giving out coffee samples. I dragged myself toward him and had a sample, and it gave me such a feeling of having returned to something like life that I returned to his table about six more times. I thought I was pretending to be a different person each time, but I wasn’t actually doing anything to disguise myself. I was so weak that I actually thought it was logical that if I approached him with a different facial expression or gait, he would think I was someone else.

I thought that buying a bag of packets of this coffee would make up for the fact that I abused the samples so badly, but when I saw the throng at the registers, I was so discouraged about having only one item that I let it collapse somewhere and vowed to buy that brand from my local supermarket.

The sugar in the coffee gave me just enough strength to partially restore my bipedalism so I could stagger the hell out of there. Whenever it is that I die, just know that I was actually supposed to die about ten years after that, but didn’t because of that time in Carrefour.

If you are not, in addition to the shower curtain or whatever it is you want, also purchasing enough outfits for every member of your tribe to color coordinate their clothing according to their moods, enough food to feed three populous villages of fat Egyptians and their livestock, and patio sets and grills for each of their homes, the answer is no. It is not worth it.

*Logo from moda international.