Ask Lemmy

Most people would still say they're going to a grocery store, they wouldn't specify "hypermarket".

It's mostly to due with sizes. There's three levels, and the leading chains in Finland both (or "all" before one got bought up by the second biggest and now there's generally only two) have a small store, which have their own names, Sale/Alepa and K-market, then there's the larger ones, S-Market and K-Supermarket (formerly KKK-supermarket, really), and then the largest ones, Prisma and K-Citymarket.

It used to be only the small grocery stores had the longest opening hours, but some years ago they released those regulations and now even the hypermarkets are 247. But the small and medium sized usually don't. Some small ones are in larger cities, I think.

But yeah it's generally just about the size, and "just" supermarkets not having department store shit as much. Like the supermarket K-Supermarket 1.2km away from me has their own fish& meat counter for instance.

The grocery store near me has a pharmacy, but the hypermarket has a pharmacy, a few restaurants, large deli and meat counters, and of course an a liquor store as in a government store that sells specifically alcohol. They're allowed to sell any alcohol, whereas grocery stores are just allowed to sell drinks up to 8%, and that's up from like 4.9% for the most of my life. Some years ago they changed it so grocery stores can sell up to 5.9, then when that didn't break society, it took like 2 years for the limit to change to 8%. And I'm pretty sure someone's gonna push for it to go to like 14 so we got proper wines in grocery stores.

The 8% crap is just awful wine. But drinkable if you carbonate it a tad. Sounds weird perhaps but I enjoy it.

Anyway the department store part of the hypermarkets is often kinda meh. Like if you want electronics or something, you'll usually go to a store that specialises in them. Like a large electronic store for clothing store or whatever. But you can sometimes get decent deals or some store brand clothes for a nice price. But like in general electronics, hardware, general hardware. There's kind of a lot of places with a lot of stores like that.

Like 2km from me by bike is an IKEA and then lots of similarly sized stores selling hardware / electronics / and always a few competing ones. Like there's several furniture stores within literally a stones throw from the ikea parking lot. (You'd have to be pretty good at throwing, but I maintain the assertion. Like frisbee golf throwing distance, definitely.)

Same with electronics stores. Like three huge stores in the same area, all within like 2-3min drives from each other. Some almost next door to each other.

Also hardware stores.

And sports stores.

Tons of others.

There's even I think like a horse-supply store, but that's a bit to the side. Not as mainstream.