Shopping in France Part Two: Les Soldes

In French, des bonnes affaires means "some good deals". For example, you might say: j'ai trouvé beaucoup de bonnes affaires pendant les soldes d'hiver, (I found a lot of good deals during the winter sales).

I was at la Part-Dieu yesterday and noticed that it was eerily empty. If I have noticed anything about "the mall" it is the one place that has made me feel the most "at home", meaning that it is usually crowded with pushy people carrying three or four shopping bags and annoying in-the-way clusters of teenagers occasionally dekeing people out. However, after looking in the stores where numbers of employees were cordoning off racks of clothes sometimes covered in sheets of plastic, each piece of clothing tagged with a huge coloured rectangle or circle printed with -50%, I soon realised: LES SOLDES!!! were coming...

Today is the first day of les soldes (the sales), when retail merchandise is marked down even 70%. In France, the government regulates sales and forbids stores to have periodic major markdowns after each season, like we are used to in Canada throughout the year. Thus, every year, the mairies of each department get together to determine the nation-wide dates of the sales and how long each will allow the stores to hold their sales (the maximum being six weeks). And so, twice a year (in January and again in June), stores are given the chance to get rid of all of last season's stock, and shoppers go nuts.

If shopping is your thing, this is the time to do it. I've been told that it's worth the wait because something that might have been 80€ can be bought for fifteen or twenty during les soldes.

In your face 2€ coffees, I'm mindlessly blowing my money elsewhere these next few weeks!