Whatever Flavour

I admit I missed the subtlety of the idea first time around. It was middle of last year and two new soft-drinks were launched onto the market called Whatever and Anything. They spent some serious marketing dollars and for a few weeks the adverts were hard to miss.

In the supermarket, I checked out the ingredients:

Water, Sugar, Colouring, Flavouring, Preservative

I decided it was junk food; a bunch of E numbers and an expensive marketing campaign and moved on. The cute part is if you actually drink the stuff (obviously I never got that far). Each brand comes in 6 flavours, but you don't know which flavour is in which can, hence:

Person A: "What would you like to drink?"
Person B: "Oh Anything"

Anything is fizzy and comes in six flavours (Cola with Lemon, Apple, Fizz Up, Cloudy Lemon and Root Beer). Whatever is non-carbonated (Ice Lemon Tea, Peach Tea, Jasmine Green Tea, White Grape Tea, Apple Tea, Chrysanthemum Tea).

It's sugary muck and I still haven't tried it but at least the idea made me smile.

Don't Panic! (please)

According to the Government, there is no, repeat, no shortage of rice in Singapore. The Times ran a page-1 headline yesterday confirming the Government's assurance that there was plenty of rice; the picture editor found a shot of a rice warehouse to emphasise the point.

If you haven't been following, international rice prices have been rising which has prompted some major exporting countries, India, Vietnam and China, to restrict exports to avoid domestic inflation. Thailand has also now put some restrictions in place, causing price rises in Singapore. It's a staple food and people get very jittery about rice and cooking oil in particular (there were cooking oil disturbances in Malaysia last year).

Hence the Government assurances, but my local NTUC rice aisle was stripped entirely bare yesterday and stories suggest pockets of panic buying when someone buys an extra bag, and then someone else thinks they should, and so on.

I'm not fussed; I eat rice but I'm not about to start stock-piling 10Kg bags to save a few dollars over the next year. It's not like petrol for which there is no alternative if you own a car, anyway both rice and petrol degrade when stored. So some food prices will rise and life will carry on. This is one herd instinct I plan to ignore.

We Mustafa Look

This story starts at a dinner party of 8 people, about half of whom we knew. As the conversation meandered around the usual middle-class obsessions of jobs, stupid politics and rising house prices we took a detour into shopping and one man's eyes lit up when we expressed no knowledge of a Singapore shop called Mustafas. We were regaled with stories of people arriving at Changi airport, leaping in a cab and saying "Take me to Mustafas". Our host admitted to starting a fracas by going to the food section to buy chapati; stood in front of a large display of many brands, she asked the Indian lady on her left which was the best one and ended up starting an argument with the lady on her right who disagreed vocally. Our host grabbed a pack and ducked out of that one. Part of the shop is open 24/7 and we were recommended to visit during the night to avoid the crowds.

So with this setup, we had to find out. Mustafas is a department store spread across several buildings in a block at the north end of Little India. Allegedly, it was mentioned in passing by the Prime Minister in an August National Day speech when he noted the significant export trade in TVs and other electrical goods that Singaporean retailers achieve.

When we moseyed along there on Saturday night, we realised we had been there before, but had never bothered to explore what looks like a fairly ordinary department store. What sets it apart is ferocious cost cutting and a wide service portfolio tweaked for Indian expats and visitors. It reminds me of Trago Mills; a large, rambling store full of everything from food, clothing, luggage, electronics, cosmetics, medicines, computers, a Post Office, money change bureau, calling cards, credit services and even an hotel. We asked one checkout lady what was in the other building and her reply of "more items" seemed unhelpfully terse until we went to check it out and indeed, it was just more stuff with little to differentiate it from the previous section other than latitude and longitude.

Prices can be good or just typical, it varies, so you need some discretion when buying but the feeling is of cost-plus pricing rather than what will the market bear?

There's loads of staff (mostly Indians) and security is reasonably tight to avoid retail shrinkage. Carry bags are tie-wrapped off at the till and later when we tired of the crowds and retired across the road to an Indian vegetarian restaurant for a stuffed naan with paneer mutter (cheese with peas) and a mango lassi, the other tables were strewn around with the characteristic pinched carrier bags. We'll be going back as it's worth an occasional visit to pick up cheap essentials and have a good Indian meal.

Unionised Canned Peas

In Singapore, canned vegetables are unionised. The biggest (and hence dominant) supermarket chain is NTUC Fairprice, owned as a cooperative by NTUC. As a union, you can join and get benefits, mainly a loyalty card which returns a dividend as an annual cash back based on your spending. I have the card but I think I'm not spending enough to make it pay.

Fairprice is pretty good I suppose (I can't get exciting about a supermarket); it's open 8am-10pm daily and prices are low. Occasionally there is something available for much less elsewhere. I am still stinging from noticing that a can of mushrooms was on sale at "The Cheapest Supermarket in Singapore" (Yes, that's its name) for much less that at Fairprice. The flip side to their Tesco-like dominance of the local market is they control so much of what consumers see on shelves. If they remove a product line from their inventory, it virtually disappears from sale, so the potential for supplier bullying is considerable.

What they do well is provide the basics for living in Singapore. There's a whole aisle of rice, but no olives. A full wet market, fish, live crabs and sometimes 'field chickens' (frogs) but no lobster. Bread is the soft, white kind, with many variations of "bread with something sugary" inside. You can buy a rice cooker (£10), a wheelchair or a lottery ticket (30mins queue at the weekends). There's an aisle of drinks, but only 1 brand of diet pop (Diet Pepsi). Instant noodles differentiate themselves by the flavoured soups and whether they are MSG-free.

My favourite stock item is the twin pack of 15W red bulbs for Chinese God's tables (they're called Chilly Bulbs in case you needed to ask for some).

Tip of the Day

What you need to appreciate is that Singapore has official and unofficial recycling systems. The official one is as one would expect of a socially responsible administration. There are re-cycling points with bins for paper, glass and plastic, but I've only seen them in tourist spots like Orchard Road and a couple of MRT stations. There's stuff in them so it works to some extent at least but I get a whiff of propaganda over substance given the vast majority of rubbish is thrown anonymously down HDB chutes with no recycling applied.

Singapore is average when it comes to wasteful packaging. Extra wrappings would add cost but there is still a huge, unending mass of plastic bags, Styrofoam and bamboo chopsticks used by shops and stalls. Everything gets a cheap plastic bag, often of a dull red (possibly recycled) plastic that is such a characteristic sight it's iconic.

Supermarket shopping is a mixed bag, as it were. Some people use little trolleys like my grandmother used, but then just use it to carry their plastic bags. Because most people will be walking home, bags need to last a 10-15min walk so anything heavy is doubled-bagged. Anything cold/frozen must be separated, so another bag. Newspaper? - another bag. Smelly fish? - another bag.

NTUC have bag-less Wednesdays, which means unprepared people like me have to put 5cents into the charity jar. Given I use the shopping bags as garbage bags at home (you need lots of small, daily bags as you can't keep waste food overnight (ants) and the chute opening is small), the scheme develops an equilibrium.

The council now has re-cycling dumpsters at some of the void decks. It is supposed to be for cardboard, paper, plastic, glass, clothes, toys, books, and so on. What actually happens is people leave all sorts of junk in and around the dumpster, and the old ladies who earn some pennies sorting trash go through it hoiking out the cardboard and aluminium cans (30p for ~65 cans), plus anything else valuable. The trouble is they are pretty focused, and if there is a cardboard box full of junk, they'll just tip out the contents to get the box.

Some re-cycling is done direct from your door. During the day, guys go around every floor buying stacks of old newspapers (60p for a 1m high pile) and collecting old electric items to be stripped for copper and other metals.

The best sort of re-cycling is reuse, and here the ad hoc system works well. Just leave anything you don't want (old sofa, bed, furniture, toys, books) at the void deck, usually on a Sunday, and it's finders-keepers.

Judging by effectiveness, the half-hearted official programme compares unfavourably versus the scavenging locals who do a better job of re-using, sorting and recovering materials at lower financial and energy cost although I acknowledge that without the Indian cleaning guys to tidy up every day, the place would look like the municipal tip.