Grocery shopping

There are two types of places where you can get food here: продукты and супермаркет.

Продукты is pretty much your neighbourhood convenience store but with more dairy and meat products (продукты means products by the way)

Супермаркет is your standard supermarket. There's also the гипермаркет (hypermarket) which is your supermarket plus department goods. Think something along the lines of Wal-Mart Supercenter or Real Canadian Superstore but the size of a Costco. Some supermarket chains (like О'кей and Лента) will offer discount cards. These usually come in handy as there are sales and specials for card holders (besides the regular discounts just for having a card).

One of the features I find interesting here is that you have to weigh your bulk food before you go to the cash. I don't see it a lot in Canada (maybe certain stores or provinces do this) but here it's quite common. You weight your bulk items like oranges or candy and it prints you a barcode sticker. The machines, however can break or run out of sticker and this is a pain for the cashier to input the code and weigh it themselves.

As for the largest chains here I believe they are О'кей, Магнит, and Ашан (AuChan for all you French people). The latter one is mostly attached to the shopping mall chain МЕГА but they can be stand alone. Then there are some chains not available in all cities of Russia either because they're local to the city (for example in Krasnodar there's Tabris) or they haven't expanded out south or east. Anyhow just a little entry for now.