bennybox

I’ve actually been complaining to my friends for _months_ that I didn’t have access to those fancy new GMail features, namely in browser chat (GTalk IM) and web clips. Of all people really!

I googled it, searched the GMail usenet. In the end, it turned out that I’m silly and needed to set my GMail language settings to English (US). I had changed it to English (UK) because I like center spelt _centre_ and other strange Canadian spellings.

Lesson learned: Canadian English stifles innovation.

No surprise, I was a bratty kid growing up. Of all the Asian foods out there, I think the only thing I really enjoyed eating was this one specific brand of instant noodles. “One package two taste!” the box proclaimed in bright orange letters. Of course, instant noodles should never be considered food. Nowadays, it’s equally rare for me to have non-Asian foods. Go fig.

I used to accompany my mom to the tiny Chinese grocer, a short 5 minute drive from my house. There was a bursting Asian community growing around Kennedy and Steeles, though the grocery, the size of a modest Beckers (or Mac’s) was hardly packed with customers looking for variety of curries, soy sauce or turkey necks - you bought whatever brand was sole by the store. If I really behaved, I was allowed a pack of ground-peanut snack, or those pizza flavour potato chips. The blueish-orange crabs I used to play with using giant metal tongs aren’t sold in stores nowadays.

Slowly, in the early nineties (?) the Chinese supermarkets started popping up. We’re talking your Big Land Farms, your Bamburgh Food Marts. And all of a sudden, it was reasonable to find fresh bok choy, choose between 15(!) kinds of chili sauce. The lineups at Bamburgh on a Saturday afternoon (you know, after Chinese school lets out) grew longer and longer, and the community grew, and were willing to drive farther for groceries.

Then in 2002, Thornhill landed Ontario’s first “big-box” Chinese Supermarket. T&T supermarket arrived. A Chinese supermarket joint-venture (between Taiwanese and Chinese-American businesspeople) that began operations in British Columbia in 1993, T&T now has 6 locations in BC, 2 in Alberta and three in Ontario.

Only at T&T do mustard, steak sauce and Korean BBQ sauce all happily share the same shelf.

The Wal-Mart of Chinese grocers is the most apt way of describing the T&T model. A giant box that sells a vast assortment (and variety!) of Asian food, a seemingly equal selection of North American food (well, the stuff Asians will buy, like salad dressing, frozen pizza and ketchup), and an in house bakery, butcher, and collection of chefs that prepare ready to eat dim sum, sushi and full course meals. Heck, T&T will even let you order cooked-food online, for in-store pickup. And the new extended hours means grocery shopping at 11:45PM is still busy. It’s quite impressive.

The Wal-Mart analogy extends beyond the grocer-catchall. In fact, you can often hear Hitoshi lamenting over T&T squeezing out all the little family-owned Asian grocery stores, like J-Town a couple blocks away from the T&T by my house. It’s this kind of big-box style one-stop “hypermarket” that are the modern business model, like Tesco in England. Hypermarkets are so big in places like the Czech Republic, that creating an ad campaign for the fake-opening of one can make headlines for weeks and spark a national debate on consumerism and commoditization. Wal-Mart in Canada has started to encroach into this space, with the recent sale of fresh produce and frozen foods, as is even bigger in the US. Loblaw’s nameless “Great Canadian Superstore”, of which one violates Maple Leaf Gardens is really the only true entry in the Canadian space. But instead of being a Wal-Mart-esque one-stop shopping trip, T&T is a one-stop for Asian cuisine.

A trip to T&T these days is far from a relaxing shopping experience. The store is crowded, don’t get me started on the parking. The small Chinese grocers are now only to be found in the heart of Chinatown, a significant part driving around town gathering each small speck of Asian culture replaced by a collection in one large brick-and-mortar building, commododized so that you can now buy everything in a single checkout line. Even the former King-in-its-day, Bamburgh Food Mart is significantly less crowded these days, as the community has found a new place to get fresh bok choy. To its credit, T&T parking lots are great for midnight hockey games.

T&T Supermarket