Friday 28 January 2011

Buying Beer and Narcotics

I'm trying to get through a number of old items I have accumulated, but I looked at Polish Market Review: I'll get rid of these quickly.

Polish market leaders for beer are Kompania Piwowarska, which produces Lech, Tyskie and Żubr (my favourite standard beer), amongst others. The producers of Żywieć also used to regularly make it into top place, depending on the strength of their advertising, but I did get the feeling Żywieć itself had been loosing popularity in the last few years. A friend of mine, Steve Bickle, once said it "tastes like piss", having to explain he meant it literally. I had to agree.


If you're not into alcohol, I also learn that a law is being amended to stop non-prescription purchase of more than one packet of anti-catarrah medicines like Cirrus, Acatar AT or Sudafed. The objective is to combat excessive consumption of these medicines for narcotic purposes, made possible by their similar effects to amphetamines. Now you know. If you live in Dolnośląskie, Śląskie, Małopolskie or Lubuskie, you're helping to account for 83% of national sales of these products. They're either very naughty or very snotty people.

Where to buy? A survey covering shopping in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia shows that the Polish group, Biedronka is the favourite (ie most frequented) grocery store, followed by Tesco, et al.


I'm not sure if the links are working and, if not why. I will try to correct it later if not, but you should be able to use the link to Polish Market Review under News and Information in the right hand column.

3 comments:

TeflSecretagent said...

I used to work in retail as a manager and I can assure everyone that Biedronka's operation is good. Tesco could probably learn a thing or two.

I too, love Zubr, Lech and Tyskie and can agree that Zywiec, tastes like piss. So does Zywiec bottled watered so I can only assume that the sewers from the town of Zywiec lead straight into the bottling plant.

Anonymous said...

Biedronka is only Polish by name, the ca[ital and owner is Portugese, or Turkish (I forgot).

Pan Steeva said...

It was a private joke, trying to distort the truth by telling the truth. Not only is it ultimately not Polish - it is Portuguese, but its dominant position in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia hid the fact that it has no presence in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.