c'est la brève du jour

New customers are arriving in droves. On Friday afternoon, the carpark in front of Tesco is jammed with cars registered in Bratislava, which is only 20 kilometres away. There are people speaking Slovak everywhere. Inside the store, families slowly tour the aisles. Every few moments, they stop and feverishly convert the prices from forints to euros, and then heap yet more merchandise into their already overloaded shopping trolleys. All the products, and these include one-off purchases like televisions and shoes, and everyday items like butter, cheese, wine, and washing powder… in a word, everything, is about 20% cheaper than it would be across the border in Slovakia. And the Hungarian checkout girls are happy to oblige, “Of course, you can pay in euros.”