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Monday 25 May 2015

Buying cigarettes

So just now I bought cigarettes in a supermarket for the first time, and I have to say it is a very strange process, the strangest I have come across. Up until now I have bought cigarettes and tobacco over the counter, as I am used to, in Pressbyrån or Svensk Tobak och Spel. I just came home to find that Pressbyrån was already shut, so I went to ICA to buy some cigarettes.
I had noticed before that over the tills there is a shelf of cards that look like the front of cigarette packets. I assumed that you chose the right card and the person on the till then gave you the correct cigarettes. That's not too complicated. Wrong!
So you choose your card, which is scanned and paid for. You then go over to another machine, scan the card, and are given your cigarettes. However, I thought you just needed the receipt so I was furiously trying to shove my receipt into the machine and getting nowhere. Just as the truth dawned on me and I was about to go back to the till, the member of staff who served me came over with the card and helped me.
I really do think that this country has a tendency to over-complicate things. In England you would go to the kiosk in the supermarket to get cigarettes. In Finland there is a machine by the conveyor belt of the till where you select the correct brand, it spits it onto the conveyor belt, and you pay for it with the rest of your shopping. When I lived in Finland the brands were shown on the machine, but a few months afterwards they banned this, considering it a form of advertisement, and just showing numbers instead. So unless you really knew the machine you had to ask for the correct number, or play cigarette roulette. Now I know that in Sweden I need to take the card with me, and once you've scanned it you can recycle it at the machine. But still, I find this very strange.

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