Hi, im wondering what the main difference between the 2 is? I know the normal one is like a walmart type place but food wise is whats available on the online website available in the marketplace one, especially in smaller cities?
Its mostly just stuff like new zealand full cream milk, chicken, aus beef, organic produce, like basically the good quality stuff and is the variety of imported goods also is the same roughly. Ill be coming to Taiwan later this week and staying in Keelung but the closest major carrefour is in New Taipei east area i think in Xike.
Also out of interest how much would a grab or taxi be roughly from there back to Keelung roughly do yous think? Im guessing around 1000 nt maybe?
I think for better products, go to the Carrefours at the big department/malls (Ciao Bong or some name like that). Here in Southern Taiwan some have been replaced by better a Japanese supermarket chain (LOPIA). I go the big Carrefour for Cheese (but it’s worse than before for choice) and some euro items but tend be more expensive now.
Carrefour has big car parks, free if you spend 1,000.
There were Carrefour Markets before the Wellcome acquisition as well.
They are just much smaller than a “real” Carrefour. Some (especially the ones that weren’t converted from Wellcome) have more than just basic groceries. Most of them though are similar to like a PX Mart.
Carrefour Market are supermarkets. Carrefour are hypermarkets.
Supermarkets are smaller and usually only sell daily products like food, drinks, home cleaning products, personal hygiene and the like.
Hypermarkets are bigger and have more variety of all the above as well as home appliances, clothes, some home tools, toys, etc. They also usually have other stores and restaurants in the same building, as well as parking.
In Taiwan all Carrefour usually have a section of imported food. While Carrefour Market usually sell more local products with a smaller imported section, if any.
Makes no sense to me as we don’t use the word hypermarket in the UK, just supermarket.. big or small.
Exactly.
To me they are separated into 3.
The big stores - These are easily the best ones, but usually a little bit further away.
The original Carrefour market place stores - These ones are usually pretty decent. Clean, decently sized and have most things.
Wellcomes converted into Carrefour market place - These are usually the smallest, dirtiest and have the least Choice. On par with that other tin pot supermarket known as pxmart.
Wait, what? I thought that’s where I picked up the word “hypermarket”, several decades ago. I’m not sure if the term is used much in North America.
Just did a very quick search and OED has The Guardian as the first citation, from 1970, but I can’t get past the paywall to see more than that.
I would have expected you to have picked it up from Canadian French before the UK/British people. I’m 90% sure France in the late 1980s/early 1990s is where I first heard the word.
I assume being originally French is why Carrefour uses it too.
I’m fairly sure it was 1980s England for me. But who knows, maybe they were talking about a visit to France.
And then the word lay dormant in my brain for many years until I started living in a country with Carrefour and (briefly) Tesco. Here, the word has more utility for me, since there’s a bigger disparity between the different store sizes than I usually find in Canada.
When I was a kid in Vancouver … yeah, like for @Marco, I think we used grocery store most often; supermarket less often, but still common.
Still, I’m surprised. For a number of decades I’ve had “hypermarket” along with “taking a lift” and “living in a flat” in the “British English that may confuse plenty of North Americans” corner of my brain.
I don’t think I’ve heard it in Canada either, but since I haven’t lived there full time in many years now, I don’t trust my increasingly poorly remembered experience.
Plus my own occasional use of the word may have contaminated the sample.
