Amsterdam -- Shopping

Last Updated: August 23, 1999

Since I was living here, my shopping needs were different from those of your standard tourist. And I'm not a big shopper anyway. But you may find some useful insights here.

Albert Heijn. A monopolistic grocery store chain.
Pied-a-terre. A map store for hiking/biking. Good bike maps for the area around Amsterdam.
De kookboekhandel. Small, but the owner knew where to find the ice cream books and what they had.
The flower market. In season, you can get 50 tulips for 10G. That's cheap, but 50 is too many. In other seasons, they have other flowers (lots of sunflowers in the summer).
The flower market "floats" (not really - most of the buildings are built on top of something). It gets a lot of press as something to visit, and while it's very colorful (there are lots of flowers), I didn't think it was special.
Xenos. A misc household store. Low end, but good to look in if you're setting up home for a while.
Hema. A higher end Xenos, more like a low-end US department store.
Lots of Ben&Jerry's. They seem to have set up a partnership with Jamin, a candy store. But these are poor Ben&Jerry's. The train station has a real one, and I've found real ones in a couple of other places.
A few Hagen-Dazs shops. The one I got a milkshake from made a poor one, though.
Some McDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Pizza hut. I didn't see any other big American chains, though. Except for A&P, which may be different from the one in the US.

And of course there's lots and lots of little stores, smoke shops (a good place to get phone cards), tourist shops (for postcards), bookstores (including several English language bookstores). The above were just some places I went to and had comments on.