Over the past couple of weeks, full-page ads have been widely seen in newspapers announcing sales and discounts on food items and encouraging more customers to take advantage of the promos. Despite the high cost of those ads, they seemed to have paid off as scores of consumers flooded stores in a bid to shop for the holy month of Ramadan.

“The Saudi capital's major supermarkets were seen packed on Friday by dozens of consumers who queued to stock up on food and other household needs with the advent of the holy month of Ramadan,” Nadia Yasin, a Sudanese resident, told Arab News on Saturday. She said that her family visited one of the city’s well-known supermarkets to buy food in preparation for the holy month and there were so many customers although it was already late in the night.

Agreeing with Yasin, Nawal Abdulmalik-Tago, also a housewife, highlighted she could not do shopping the past two days for the shopping centers were full of people and it would take them hours waiting in queues to buy some food stuff for the household, adding that she had to leave and come the next day for shopping but it was also the same scenario.

“Driven by the high discounts offered by the traders, we were encouraged to go back again at 2 o’clock in the afternoon the following day but it was also crowded. There was hardly any space for any customer to move around in the store,” she said.

Parking was also a nightmare for customers, she complained, adding that driving through the streets to get to a mall or a supermarket is an agony and finding a parking lot is discouraging at times for customers who keep wandering and circling around the shopping centers for long periods to find a place to park.

It is natural that customers look for places that offer big discounts on various food items, Jannette Arenque, a teacher living in Riyadh, said, adding that in one supermarket the cost of chicken is almost half its regular price.

“This is true as far as the other food items like beef, vegetable oil, fruits, jams and beverages are concerned and because of the big number of customers the check-out lines are really long,” said Arenque.