Carrefour Salalah opens, starts with an immediate fail.

French super-market chain, Carrefour, finally opened it's new store in Salalah off of Robat Road just before the weekend last week. Local Dhofari blogger, Dhofar Eco Bug, covered the opening on their blog, which I'm basically re-blogging here because it just blows me away that this would even happen.

In an apparent marketing strategy to indicate just how fresh their cuts of meat are at Carrefour Salalah, some bright spark thought it'd be a great idea to get a cow in on the act. A real, live, terrified cow. Locked in a cage, and wheeled around the fresh meat section of the supermarket.

What. The. Fuck?

Aside from the fact that this would have been totally terrifying for the cow, what exactly did the management think would happen when the cow inevitably shat itself? So, come to Carrefour, and smell poop and buy possibly contaminated meat.

Rightyho!

I robbed the pictures from Dofar Eco Bug's blog, and the pictures were taken by S Anil Kumar - thanks for sharing them!

le fin.

Champions League Final tonight

Tonight sees the Champions League Final, and they Grand Hyatt and Heineken are also putting on a MASS screening in the Copacabana for the night! Copa will be decorated up so will not look like Copa and they will have some great “Stadium” food on offer as well…….FREE entry and a reverse happy hour! Once the final whistle blows all bar prices drop by 40%! Darren from HiFM will be on hand to start the after party as well and DJ on into the night.

They've got a super big screen to watch the game on too...

le fn.

SBG caught selling fake MAN truck parts... apparently

So fresh off the rumour mill this Thursday afternoon is an amusing story regarding Saud Bahwan Groups' Arabian Engineering Services (the sole MAN trucks dealer in the Sultanate). Here's the story how I heard it:

A staff member at SBG found himself "let go" and sent back home to his home country after some apparent disagreements with his employers. This ex-staff member then returned to Oman and reported to the ROP a story that MAN trucks were selling duplicate parts and passing them off as genuine parts.

Apparently a warehouse in Barka was used to re-package the not-genuine parts into packaging indicating that the parts were indeed genuine. Once the re-packing had been completed, the parts were then shipped on for distribution amongst the MAN service centres.

A number of senior management at SBG have been guests of the ROP at 2 different police stations in the Capital area, for a week so far.

I've no idea if it's true, but I do know that 1 specific senior manager at SBG has been unavailable all of this week.

Naturally, as all of the newspapers in this town are heavily funded by automotive advertising dollars, I doubt we'll see this story turn up - but I'm told the situation is very real.

Rather amusing, especially when SBG played heavy handed tactics with Tariq al Kiyumi and his Genuine Toyota spare parts store in Wadi Kabir a few years ago - if you don't know the story, check out Other Oman's coverage of it, here. The cliff-notes of the story though, are these: Local guy opens up a store selling genuine Toyota parts for less than SBG. SBG buy the building he ran his shop from and kicked him out. Tariq opened a new store and carried on trading, SBG bought land next to his new store and built a new Toyota Parts shop. Nice.

Enjoy the weekend!

le fin.