Staniel Cay - Pink vs. Blue

Today we went into town to do some provisioning. There are three grocery stores, Isles General Store (which is way on the south side of the island) and two other stores in town called Pink Pearl market and Burke's Blue Market. We went into town and surprisingly the two markets are right next to each other, Pink Pearl is run by the people who own the shocking pink house while Burke's is run by the guy who owns the bright blue house. Deceptively simple. We scouted both out before buying anything and you would think that with two stores right next to each other they would have competitive prices. Not so. One had cheaper produce while the other had cheaper snacks. Butter was cheaper at the Blue store by more than a dollar but the Pink store was the only one that sold rum (at $30 a liter! Yikes!) Neither of the owners were real happy to see me writing down the prices for each item before committing to buy, we did get a glare or two. I guess a lot of shoppers must just choose their favorite color and buy all their goods from the same place, but since they were so close together we just bought stuff wherever it was cheapest. That way everyone wins, since both of them got a little bit of business and we got the best prices.

We were buying produce from the pink lady and I pointed at a piece of fruit and asked "how much are the mangoes". The lady just started laughing and said "well, first of all that's a papaya. These here are mangoes." And then she went on to point out "and that one there, that's a pineapple". Well that made us laugh since we knew at least what a pineapple looked like. She just looked at us like we were loonies, shook her head, rang us up (no cash register, no receipts), and told us to have a nice day.