Brazil is a great place for shopping. There, you will be able to find from gigantic shopping meccas in big capitals to small shacks selling handcrafts or produce by the side of roads. Brazil is part of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), a block of emerging countries with dynamic economies thanks to soaring commodity prices. As a consequence, a newly minted class of ultra-rich Brazilians has been awarded with an inflow of international luxury-brand stores comparable only to those in, well, other BRIC countries!
In big capitals, you’ll be delighted with the enormous and well-served shopping centers, shopping malls, where there are, among other things:
*lojas, stores, such as lojas de departamentos, department stores, butiques, boutiques, joalherias, jewelry stores;
*serviços, amenities, that include farmácias, pharmacies, chaveiros, locksmiths, lava-a-seco, dry-cleaners, sapatarias, shoe repair, corrêio, post-office, agências de turismo, tourist agencies and caixas eletrônicos, ATMs;
*alimentação, food court, with lanchonetes de comida rápida, fast-food snack bars, restaurants, restaurants, bares, bars, churrascarias, barbecue, pizzarias, pizza, and sorveterias, ice-cream parlors;
*entretenimento, entertainment, among which, cinemas, movie theaters, ringue de patinação, skating rinks, boliche, bowling and fliperamas, electronic games arcades.
Of course, you will also be able to find regular shopping nas ruas, on streets, that are usually exclusively dedicated to this purpose, as Brazilians like to keep residential and commercial districts separated.
Municipal Market in São Paulo
One of the most important activities of the cotidiano, everyday life, is shopping for alimentação, food. In Brazil you’ll find hypermercados, hypermarkets, usually owned by empresas estrangeiras multinacionais, multinational foreign companies, in more peripheral regions of big cities, since, as their name implies, they’re huge! Within cities and towns you can fazer compras, go shopping, at supermercados, supermarkets, or even mercadinhos, small markets. Traditionally mom-and-pops, mercearias, grocery stores, sell things like cleaning products, beverages, canned items and food in boxes or bags, like cereal, rice and beans. Another type of mercado, is a quitanda, the green grocer, where you’ll find frutas e verduras, fruit and vegetables.
In spite of all the different stores dedicated to selling food products, every bairro, neighborhood, in every city has uma feira, a street market. Read more about them in an earlier blog post.
In feiras, you can pechinchar, haggle, especially if you go towards the end of the day.
Click on the link below to watch a video of a street taken over by a typical feira:
