 | Quito Shopping | Tips 1 - 10 of 35 |  |
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 | |  |  | Supermaxi/Megamaxi: Quito's answer to Wal-Mart | Tip Rating:   |  |  | |  |
Super and Mega Maxi is a chain of grocery stores across Ecuador. They used to be known as La Favorita until round about 1980. The name changed to Super Maxi. Round about the turn of the century, Super Maxi opened up huge hypermarkets called Mega Maxis as well as the standard Super Maxi. They are equivalent to our Wal-Mart Super Centres where you have everything under one roof. Normally, grocery stores, even hypermarkets like this, display types of food that are foreign to the American traveller. I was disappointed to see so many familiar brand names on the shelves of this grocery store. I did find chimichurri here and they did have local fruits, but otherwise it was like Wal-Mart Super Centre under a different name. What disturbed me about this place is our bag boy, Fernando, is only 14 years old and they pay him a pittance even by local standards.
There is a bank, a gardening department, a hair salon, and even a Radio Shack. When Sergio, Christina, and I did our shopping there, it was already decked out for Christmas by mid-November. They got the normal week's worth of groceries and I got some chimichurri for steaks, some Ecuadorian coffee, and, believe it or not, I found the soaps my grandma wanted for Christmas here. Where there is a Super or a Mega Maxi, a Juguetón is not likely to be far away. This toy super store, rather like the American Toys 'r Us, is owned by the same folks who run the Maxis. Leave a Comment Theme: Food and Drink
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| | | | Condado: upmarket and multinational | Tip Rating:  | | | | |
El Centro Comercio de Condado is a tall, but not very wide (as compared with suburban American malls) shopping centre in urban Quito. It is built more like Part Dieu in Lyon. Like Part Dieu, it has many multinational stores (like Benetton) and some local stores like Cotopaxi clothing store, in this case. This is not my idea of a good place to shop. The only reason I went here is because Sergio recommended I try the food court, including McDonald's (yuck!), many restaurants of other nationalities, but I ate lunch at Motes la Magdalena which offers nothing but fine Ecuadorian cuisine and I had some tres leches for dessert at the Hansel & Gretel bakery. It was a great culinary experience, but when I took the indoor photo (second shot), some mall rent-a-cop tried to give me trouble. There were no signs prohibiting photography and I wasn't just going to give into a spur-of-the moment whim on some law enforcement wannabe who must have failed the police academy. I asked him in plain Spanish when he failed the academy. Needless to say, that idiot never got my camera or my memory card!
It's too upmarket for my tastes and when they decide to hire rent-a-cops with better things to do, I'll go back! Leave a Comment Theme: Other
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on November 22, 2005
on April 26, 2004
on November 8, 2007
on November 19, 2007
