I’ve been lucky to have spent much of the winter season of 2019-2020 living along the southern coast of Spain. Occupying a leased casa near the facility of an old town for a prolonged time, which certainly involved engaging with residents, including commercial with shopkeepers and so on, provided me a fantastic chance to observe just how daily financial life has stayed in a location far from my New Hampshire residence.
To be clear, I genuinely have a life outside of financial monitoring, but for functions of this piece, I’ll focus on a slight unscientific contrast between exactly how individuals perform business exchange in the corner of Spain and N.H. To further set this up, note that I purposely lived without a car and had no information prepared for three months, relying on mass transit and WiFi (or wee-fee as they cutely say there).
These near-monastic techniques aside, let me tell you about my provisional Spanish hometown. Fuengirola, a little city of 75K residents, lies along the Mediterranean coastline 25 miles west of Malaga, the big city in those parts. It remains in the independent region of Andalusia (like a United States state), Spain’s most significant of these separate areas. Considering that the Islamic Moors controlled it for about seven centuries, the design and society are a unique mix of Christian and Muslim influences not seen elsewhere in Europe. Andalusians have credibility for being emotional as well as fun-loving. I concur.
What is most apparent commercially is how antique things seem, at least to an individual in his late sixties. In NH, naturally, we enter our automobiles and drive to substantial grocery stores and big box shops to purchase our stuff, or as is progressively the instance, we order points online and have them shipped to our residences. Yet right here, the little “Mama & Pop” shops are alive and seemingly well. Other than Sunday, the daily walkways include people marketing fruits, vegetables, medicines, garments, pieces of bread/pastries, alcohol, and lotto tickets (substantial right here).
I must confess that despite an evident inefficiency with mosting likely to one look for your bread, an additional for your veggies, and an extra for meat, I delighted in the quaintness and personal touch of being familiar with the people who worked these facilities. Degrees of individual solutions constantly seemed high, and I never felt hurried. Sure, Amazon.es and also substantial box stores like El Corte Ingles exist, but little block & mortar retail is hanging on below reasonably well.
