The Quirks of Bangladesh Shopping

If I was going to pick a place to live in Bangladesh, I would chose the rural areas in a heartbeat so I don’t quite understand the with attracting doctors to rural areas. It is not like you are missing out on the night life in Dhaka, since there are no bars anywhere in the country. The closest thing Bangalis have to bars are their tea shops, which are everywhere, even in the most remote village. And there is usually a decently sized market a couple of kilometres from you, no matter where you are in the country.

After walking through some of the big markets in Dhaka, you realise that there are at most only about 10 types of stores in Bangaldesh: mens clothes, womens clothes, jewellery, leather accessories (belts, wallets), grocery store / tea shop, electronics store, appliance store, tailor, barber shop, fruit / fish market. After that, every big bazaar is just those ten stores selling the exact same products ten times over.

There are some other stores, but they are not so much for the individual consumer more for other businesses, they are still identical wherever you are in the country though. There is the metal rod shop, the metal bed frame shop, furniture shop (they make some very nice hardwood furniture!), the bamboo pole shop (used for scaffolding and stilts to hold buildings up!), the plumping pipe shop, and the mechanic / tyre shop (they pop a lot of tyres here). I think it might be written in the Qur’an that you can only sleep in bed on a silver, red or black bed frame since those appear to be the only bed frames sold here.

We went to Bashundara City Mall, in Dhaka last week. It is the largest mall in south Asia! It was 8 or 9 floors tall and each floor was fairly big as well but the best part was the way they organised the mall. They are not as commercialized as North America, so stores were grouped by product. The high end stuff was split between the ground floor and the top floor next to the Cinema. These two floors where were most of the people were too. The other floors are organised by product: sports accessories, mens clothing, womens clothing (2 floors), music, jewellery, etc.

In North America we organise malls so that you have to do the maximum amount of walking past the maximum number of window displays to get between the two stores that you want. In Bangladesh there is one floor that has everything you want. Much more to my liking, and when you ask one store for something the owner will take you around to other stores if he does not have what you are looking for!

Cheers,

Mike

PS – I have a couple posts from our weekend trip to Srimongal and the Tea Estates, but I will save those for tomorrow!