How I Love Centra
If you have been reading my blog then you are either Alisha or a spammer but you will have also known that last year I went on exchange to Dublin, Ireland where I studied at University College Dublin. Apart from being hands down the most amazing experience of my life, I noticed some very interesting things in Dublin as well as all of Ireland which directly relate to what we are learning in GRS class. Since everyone loves food, that is what I will talk about first. In Ireland like in most of Europe people have much smaller fridges in their homes which are about the same size as what we call bar fridges. Only once when I was in the home of a very wealthy family did I see a large fridge that we are accustomed to seeing here. As a result of this people need to go shopping far more often for food than we do in Canada. Buying milk and bread is at least done every other day if not daily because due to the size of fridges, the largest size container of milk that can be bought is 2 liters. Bread is bought so often because all bread is made without preservatives and this mixed with the exceptionally moist climate causes bread to grow mold in less than three days. Since shopping is done so much they have something in Ireland which I had never encountered before and this was a store called Centra. There are other stores which are similar such as Spar or Tesco Express but since Centra is 100% Irish owned I will look at it. But what is Centra? Well Centra is a corner grocery store. In Canada your mind instantly thinks of something like a 7-11 but despite having a similar size, that is where the difference ends. Imagine taking everything you could find at a Safeway and reducing the variations of products so that there are two types of jams instead of 60 different brands and flavours for example and you now have a Centra. Centra is a full blown grocery store with a deli, produce section, dairy section and anything else you could expect to find in a grocery store but streamlined to fit into an extremely small footprint. As a single person I was able to do 90% of all my shopping for my entire semester at the Centra right on campus. Yes there was a Centra on campus, there was also one a 3 minute walk off campus and another one 10 minutes from that location. They are everywhere! Centra is designed with traditional Irish village culture in mind where you can walk a short distance from your house, do all your shopping and walk back. There is no need at all to take a car and since Irish law charges 25 cents for a bag at any store everyone brings their own. This environmentally concept fascinated me and in a city as densely populated as Vancouver I could see it being hugely successful! If you were wondering how Centra manages to compete with the large super markets it is quite ingenious. The thousands of Centra’s across Ireland are all independently owned (the campus one was “Molloy’s Centra” as the sign said) however, they are all franchises and purchase all of their stock together which makes them more many products cheaper than what you would find at the major supermarkets. This ease of shopping combined with the low cost makes Centra so popular that everyone shops there without even thinking about being how environmentally friendly they are and this is something that I would love to see be brought to Canada.