Behind Liang, at serve-yourself tanks full of crab and clams, retired physicist Yang Fuming leans over a bed of ice with stingrays and other Chinese delicacies to watch a clerk gut a live carp. “We come here every two to three days for the fresh stuff,” he says. “They’ve got everything you need.” He drops the bloody plastic bag with the still-convulsing fish ($1.25 for two pounds) into his shopping cart. He’s got an apron and a couple of seat covers in there, too.
Take a walk through a Chinese Wal-Mart, and the atmospherics might not feel all that foreign. The layout’s similar, the smell of free samples wafts through the air, and there’s that clinical glow of light. This aesthetic hasn’t always translated overseas—Wal-Mart’s had mixed success with its foreign ventures. But this year its sales in China are expected to surpass $1 billion—fueled, in part, by high-end “wet” groceries it sells to middle- and upper-class urbanites. Now the company wants to expand its reach. It reportedly offered $1 billion to buy Trust-Mart , China’s second-largest “hypermarket” chain, which would more than double its presence in the country.
When Americans shop at Wal-Mart, they go for packaged bulk goods. But most Chinese shop only a few days, not months, ahead, and some shop multiple times a day. The grocery has an outdoor-market feel. In the seafood section, Zhang Chunmei serves nibbles of crayfish and squid quick-fried with chopped ginger, onion and garlic in an electric wok. “It’s Chinese style,” she says. “Very simple.” In the meat department, long strips of bacon hang freely at one stand; a large icebox cools links of cured garlic-flavor sausage from the northern city of Harbin. Nearby, as if transplanted from an Old Beijing street, is a free-standing booth with exposed trays of freshly carved pig’s head, pig’s intestines, jellied pig skin and blackened-pink shards of pig’s liver. Another booth is equipped with heat lamps to warm dangling roast ducks. A heat-and-serve package of sliced Beijing duck, pancakes and plum sauce costs a little more than $2. Which is, of course, the chain’s primary appeal: the same meal would go for $5 at a restaurant.
The deli at the Wal-Mart in northern Beijing serves workers on the go. European cheeses and salamis occupy one window. The rest is distinctly local: pickled vegetables, hand-cut noodles, smoked meats, baskets of steamed baozi stuffed with carrot and eggplant fillings. There’s even a station making jianbing, which is hard to find in today’s Beijing. It’s a wrap of crispy millet pancake, egg and scallion, long known to some foreign-exchange students as the Egg McMao. It costs about 40 cents, half the price of a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich in China. “I wanted to buy one outside, but there isn’t any in this area anymore,” says software programmer Wang Yu. “So I came here for lunch.” He wasn’t alone.
The bakery is more Americanized. It’s wall to wall with sprinkled donuts and cream pastries. But there are also cans full of a state-owned grocery staple, a pastry filled with dates, black sesame paste, red-bean paste and salted egg yolks. A motherly clerk, Zhao Fengqi, cuts slices of a fluffy cake made from butter and honey. “We created this here,” she says. “You could say it’s a mix of Chinese and Western.”
When it comes to produce, Wal-Mart’s chief competitors are the country’s ubiquitous farmers’ market booths and corner stands. Most supermarkets in Beijing only stock a bare minimum, unable to compete with the cutthroat price pressures in China’s countryside. Wal-Mart has 30 varieties of leafy greens and a growing supply of organic vegetables. “The price is sometimes higher, but you don’t have to worry about the quality,” says Ruan Yuan, 54, with five kiwis in hand. China’s media is riddled with stories of mass food poisonings at restaurants and school cafeterias. Ruan, a grandmother, says, “For the kids, I feel safer here.”
The store picks its spots carefully. It peddles cheap munchies mostly on the ramps between floors, with a cornucopia of dried fish strips, rice crackers, shredded pork floss and wasabi peanuts arranged primly on railings. But in every way Wal-Mart is organized, Trust-Mart, the hypermarket chain Wal-Mart reportedly wants to buy, is cluttered and confused. At a location on Beijing’s west side, there’s a little of everything: cheap watches, cell phones, leather loafers, slippers. Customers interviewed said they shop there solely because they live in the neighborhood, a sprawling subdivision of high-rises. Ads for wine are in the rice aisle. Three of the country’s biggest milk companies have sales boys competing on-site. And at this Trust-Mart’s seafood tanks, the clerks are not as, well, friendly as Wal-Mart’s Liang Lianchun. When a young, female customer couldn’t decide whether she wanted to buy shrimp dead or alive, one older female clerk dumped them out. “There,” she said. “They’ll be dead soon.”
