I found the retail landscape in Oaxaca confounding. At its core, my confusion was about the apparent mismatch between supply and demand. There were so many shops and so much merchandise, and so much of it seemingly duplicative, it didn’t seem possible that there was enough demand to support every one of the businesses. Yet, there were signs everywhere soliciting full-time employees, so they had to be going concerns at some level.

I’d hoped the move to Mexico City (CDMX) would provide some meaningful context. Maybe it was a Oaxaca-specific problem, or maybe there was some wrinkle to the CDMX landscape that would shed light on things. Instead, if anything, my confusion deepened.

As I mentioned in the post on landing in CDMX, our particular chunk of the city, the Historic Centro, is segregated into retail districts: lighting, beads, sporting goods, plumbing, chicken, hardware… There’s even a snack district, which is very possibly the best thing ever invented. Businesses selling similar goods have clustered together in the same small areas.

The benefits of that arrangement aren’t hard to figure out. From the business side, I don’t have to market to attract specific customers. Anyone looking for lighting, for example, is going to come to the one area, and all I have to do is visually attract them once they’re on the street. Marketing becomes more about retail display than outreach, which is generally an easier nut to crack.

From the consumer side, I know that I can just go to one area to shop. I don’t have to qualify specific businesses or do any homework. I just show up and start shopping.

But the downsides seem just as apparent, and this is where the overlap with Oaxaca becomes clear: it’s about the mismatch between supply and demand. It’s hard to estimate with any precision, but there are literally hundreds of lighting shops in our neighborhood. Maybe 500? More? From the business side, the competition for customers is fierce, and relying on retail display to attract customers is hard, when every other business is doing the same thing.

As a customer, my problem is the obverse: how can I possibly figure out where to shop with all those options and all that noise? Choice is fine, until there are so many choices it becomes paralyzing.

Lighting seems to be the extreme example, just based on the scale (although the plumbing district comes close). But if, in a two block stretch, there are 30+ shops all selling what appear to be identical raw chickens (and there are), how do I choose as a customer and how do I survive as a business?

Here’s another wrinkle, which we’ve seen all over CDMX: the same businesses occupying storefronts right next to one another. We saw it a little in Oaxaca, with the Parisina fabric store having shops on opposite street corners, but it’s much more prevalent here.

Obviously, I don’t know the answer. But that’s never stopped me from putting forth a theory and treating it like a fact. Let’s start by looking at how people used to shop, before the introduction of supermarkets and malls, the kudzu of retail.

In the early to mid 1800s, the options in the US were small specialty shops, peddlers, or open air markets. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that grocery and dry goods stores, that stocked a wide range of items, became prevalent. The first self service grocery store, a Piggly Wiggly, opened in 1916 in Memphis. The first modern supermarket, a King Kullen, opened in Queens in 1930.

This transition ushered in a shift from depth to breadth that exists to this very day. If I visit a farmer’s market, there may be twenty vendors all selling tomatoes. That’s depth. If I go to a supermarket, there may be three kinds of tomatoes, but there’s unlikely to be multiple Romas to pick from. But I can get peanut butter and roach spray and boxed wine. That’s breadth. And a Date Night kit.

So my choice, as a modern consumer, is likely to be what supermarket or big box chain I prefer. One may have better prices, one may have more sales, another may have better overall selection of products. But once I visit my chosen store, I’m shopping the breadth, not the depth, of its offerings.

Contrast that to Olde Tyme shopping. There might have been a dozen butchers in my town. They may sell mostly the same cuts of meat, but collectively I have choices that don’t exist in a supermarket/big box context. Or there might be the aforementioned farmer’s market, with dozens of farms all selling lettuce they’ve grown. That’s depth, not breadth.

Consumers in that context had a familiarity with parsing depth that today in the US we’ve largely lost. There are vestiges of it, still. Most obviously, there’s the proliferation of farmer’s markets all over the country. Shoppers have lots of reasons to visit a farmer’s market: supporting local producers, easier access to organic products, reducing the carbon footprint of imported produce, cosplaying village life. But the depth of the selection of products is absolutely a key driver. Choosing the reddest, most beautiful tomatoes from amongst all the options scratches an atavistic hunter/gatherer itch that’s still there, no matter how much we shop at Krogers.

So how does that explain the retail landscape in Mexico? There are supermercados and big box stores here, after all. Oaxaca has a Home Depot, CDMX has an Ikea and multiple Walmarts. What’s the difference?

The difference is, that’s not all they have. While every neighborhood has a supermercado, there’s also a traditional mercado, which is much like a permanent, enclosed farmer’s market. Dozens of produce vendors, dozens of little restaurants, dozens of butchers… Mexican shoppers manage depth every time they shop.

Which explains the lighting district, and chicken district, and snack district (although the snack district can also be explained by the existence of God). While I’ve been baffled by how the lighting district can sustain itself, and how consumers can parse the dizzying array of choices, we’ve been making those distinctions every time we enter a mercado.

One of the mercados in Oaxaca had a hall of grilled meat. There were more than 30 carnicerias in that hall, all selling effectively identical products at exactly the same prices. Yet we always managed to choose. Maybe the meat was a little redder or fresher looking. Maybe the griller seemed more diligent. Maybe we just fucking guessed.

Mexico is a dessert culture, and there’s a huge number of panaderias and ice cream shops. I get ice cream at Santa Clara. Why? Because they’re all over, I stopped there once, and it was really good. Is it better than the ice cream at La Michoacana? I have no idea, because I keep going back to Santa Clara.

And therein, I believe, lies the answer. It doesn’t matter if the ice cream is objectively better at La Michoacana. What matters is that I like the ice cream at Santa Clara. It doesn’t matter if I find the exact specific light fixture of my dreams by visiting all 500+ lighting vendors. What matters is if I found something that fits my needs.

When confronted with what looks like a paralyzing level of choice, you don’t have to find the very best option. You only have to find what you want. And with so many choices, that’s not all that hard to do. The array of choices isn’t as big as it looks, because you can stop whenever you’re satisfied.

I think the reason this looked so weird to us at the outset is because it’s simply not a style of shopping that’s very prevalent in the US any longer. Outside of farmer’s markets, where else do you really see village-style shopping?

Mexico has found a delightful balance, with a smattering of supermercados and big box stores able to coexist peacefully with an older, more traditional style of commerce. Unlike the US, where the spread of those stores has been an extinction-level event for any other form of retail. The only choice we have left to us is between Costco and Sam’s Club.

This is why we left the US for world travel. It’s so easy to think of our culture as the apotheosis of human history, the ultimate expression of whatever it is we’re up to at the moment. It’s only by visiting other places, and staying long enough to notice, that you realize how untrue that is, how very many patterns and methods that have real, tangible value have been trampled to death by our particular approach to unfettered capitalism and the unqualified belief that new is always better than old.

I started confused, but I’m ending up invigorated by what I’ve figured out by tugging at this particular knot. As we continue to travel, each place we visit will have something about how it functions that won’t make sense, on the surface. Teasing out the why underneath those disconnects will be one of the highlights of our adventure.

When this journey ends and we finally return, we’ll come back with a deeper, more nuanced appreciation for the very special ways in which the US is fucked up. Thanks, world!