The Corte Inglés Rant

I have mentioned it a few times on this blog, but today I'm going to expound on my dislike for the Corte Inglés. Corte Inglés is this Spanish chain of stores. The stores themselves are huge and are kind of like a department store (like Macy's) with a grocery store in the basement. Then outside of the main store you can usually find a Corte Inglés bookstore and/or music/movie store. Some of the stores also have travel agencies in/around them. Pretty much this huge store is located in almost every neighborhood of the city. (There is one two blocks away from my house in one direction and about five or six blocks away in the other direction.) Also, outside of Madrid there is Hipercor (which is owned by Corte Inglés) which I haven't been to, but I'm guessing is kind of like Costco or something. So I guess my first reason for disliking the Corte Inglés is that I feel like it tries to be too many things.

Anyway, the store is supposed to have anything your little heart desires. Well in my opinion, the stupid store has both everything and nothing at the same time. I can find pretty much anything that I don't need and nothing that I do need. And the stuff that I can find is in the most random places. And everything is super overpriced. I don't know why I even go there, but today I did. I needed a new mesh laundry hamper thing and some tights for this party I'm going to on Friday night. First I decided to look for the laundry hamper. I figured it would be in the pet store part (by the hangers--see this post for that story) and I was kind of right. I wandered around for a while and finally asked somebody where I could find something to put my dirty clothes in (I didn't know the Spanish word for hamper at the time). Well the worker guy showed me this 20 euro hamper thing and after I scrunched up my face at the price (I was looking for like those mesh pop up laundry hampers that you can by at Target for like five dollars) he poked around some more before finally saying he didn't have anything else and scampering off. I gave up that search and decided to look for the tights.

I found those without any problem. However, I picked up this decent looking pair and they were 21 euro. My question is, who would pay 20-some euros for tights that will probably end up getting snagged on something the second time you wear them? Not this girl (the fact that I'm a klutz means I would probably snag them the first time I wore them). Then I wandered around some more and they just had so many to choose from that it was overwhelming. The problem with all of the options was that, aside from those 20-some euro tights, most did not have a price on them. Finally I just picked up an inexpensive looking pair and checked out (and was relieved to find out that they were, indeed, fairly inexpensive).

So yes, these experiences have not been terribly traumatic in and of themselves (well the experience in the Corte Inglés coupled with my post office experience was a bit traumatic), but each time I go to that store I just get more and more annoyed with it. And no, the Corte Inglés is not some metaphor for Spanish culture in general or anything like that (because I do really love Spain and Madrid and everything). It's just a store that really annoys me and makes me really miss Target. Seriously, I'd give just about anything to have Target only two blocks away.

Oh and just to let you know, tonight I walked around the neighborhood with these two girls who just moved in and I pointed out the "chino"* located around the corner. We went inside to look around and I found a mesh hamper in there almost right away for only four euros.

*(It's kind of hard to explain what a chino is without sounding a little bit politically incorrect or something, but in most neighborhoods there are these super cheap stores with the most random assortment of stuff in them that are generally owned by Chinese people. The Spanish word for Chinese is Chino, thus the Spaniards refer to these stores as chinos.)