It was one of my first trips ever to a supermarket, as a toddler, that I distinctly remember a woman of middle age taking a donut from the fresh pastry case and eating it there on the spot. The woman made a great impression on me and, at the age of four, I recollect clearly thinking the donut aisle was where I wanted to spend the rest of my days.

The woman continued to eat the irresistible bear claws when my father, the do-gooder that he is, eventually approached the store manager; a tall man named Lou, and reported the donut thief who was then confronted and asked to leave the store. It was a cruel act of justice by my dad and from it, I came away encompassing the idea of a supermarket as a righteousness place where inevitably bad things happened to people who only deserved the worst.

Supermarkets in Panama, not unlike fake breasts, vary in size, shape, and quality.

The crème de la crème are the Reba Smiths and the Deli Gourmets where one can find almost anything one might in the USA. It was here that I found my beloved Arizona Iced Tea after searching for months, and it was here that I picked up all-beef hotdogs made by a company whose name I can’t even pronounce.

The go-to supermarket in Panama is a chain called El Rey which keeps its stores open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. For the shopper, this is the ultimate in accessibility and perhaps the only resource for those looking to bake a chicken or roast a filet at 3AM on a Tuesday. This chain keeps its stores at roughly the temperature of a meat freezer but these are the sacrifices we pay to have round-the-clock shopping.

Similar in quality and size to El Rey are your Machetazos and your Super 99s which, while they vary in products, can usually provide the basics of a grocery shopping session. Below them on the shopping totem poll are the chinitos: the little Chinese shops which are dirty and grimy but oh so omnipotent. The meat counters at the back of a chinito is similar in cleanliness and odor to a sacrificial table in the Mohave. Fruits and vegetables are often shrouded by clouds of flies which circle over top, like miniature hawks.

It is at a chinito where the Panamanian likes to buy a glass soda bottle and drink it there on the spot: in the doorway perhaps or on a small wooden stool meant for that purpose alone. They also have donuts at chinitos which nostalgically raises the opportunity I once came across when I was young.

Eating food in the grocery store without paying for it was taught to me, from a very early age, to be a risky type of stunt. And in Panama, where they only cost a nickel or a dime, there’s really no reason not to splurge and take several for the road.

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Filed under: Food on May 13th, 2008