One of the greatest challenges to the newly arrived gringo in Chile is the small-store purchase process. It is a three-step procedure that requires interaction with up to three different people.
1. Making your selection
In many drugstores, the entire stock of products is physically located behind the counter, which may stretch around the entire perimieter of the store.
So you have to ask out loud, in your tentative, gringo-y Spanish, for the condoms/tampons/laxative you’ve come in for. In fact you don’t just have to ask for it, you have to have a whole conversation about it, since the pharmacist will need to know what brand/size/flavor you want. And you’re not familiar with the brands yet, so he’ll take out several and put them on the counter in front of you for you to consider.
2. Caja
Once you’ve indicated your choice of condoms/tampons/laxative, the employee helping you may ring up your purchases on what looks like a cash register. But don’t hand over your pesos yet. He is, in all likelihood, printing up an voucher showing the total amount you owe, for you to take to the caja– the cashier. You take the voucher to a glassed-in cubicle with just enough room for a person and a cash register. You slide the paper and your money through the slot, and get back your change, the voucher, now stamped, and your receipt.
3. Empaque
You may think you should now head back to the counter to get your purchase from the guy who originally helped you, who is presumably holding your selected product(s) for you. What you may not have noticed is that while you were at the caja paying, he handed your goods over to the empaque, possibly with a second copy of the voucher.
The job of the person at the empaque is to well, pack up what you bought, and then deliver it to you when you show you have paid. So you head over there, hand her your stamped voucher, and are get in return a bag that is probably stapled shut with one of the aforementioned pieces of paper attached to it. That’s it! You’re done! You can leave now. Oh, and welcome to Chilean bureaucracy, private-sector style.
So, you may wonder, why do these stores have three people doing the job of one? My guess is that it has to do with security (probably not much gets stolen with this system in place) and low expectactations as far as employees’ IQs go. Times they are a-changin’, though, and many drugstores (especially chains in Santiago) have implemented a system in which items are available for inspection on the shelf; you can pick them out yourself, and then take them to one person who will charge you for them and bag them. Pretty cool!