For residents of big cities, grocery shopping is a familiar routine. Giant supermarkets and hypermarkets, shoppers maneuvering their trolleys around a store, along the shelves groaning under piles of all kinds of food. Convenient, technologically advanced, up-to-date. But they have this impersonal, utilitarian feel. For example, a corner store or, even better, a village store feel different. They certainly have their own vibe. It is there that you can encounter those proverbial "saleswomen" that have become a popular culture thing.
BelTA journalists went to meet one of the country’s most famous saleswoman, spent a whole working day with her, travelled tens of kilometers and visited the most remote corners of the country to deliver bread and.. No, not a spectacle but human communication, which is sometimes lacking in remote villages with just few residents.
Lyudmila Krisanova is a well known person in Kostyukovichi District, because day after day for decades she has been travelling to the most remote communities of the district to deliver food. But one day the whole country learned about her. The woman received her share of fame after President Aleksandr Lukashenko came over to her mobile shop. During a working trip to Kostyukovichi District, the head of state was shown a new mobile retail store truck by Belkoopsoyuz. It is this truck that Lyudmila Krisanova has been using lately.
"Thank you, Lyudmila, for serving people," the president said to the woman. “The work is not easy, but rewarding: people are very grateful when you come, right? Moreover, everything that is available in a brick-and-mortar is on sale in your store. It is just that the volumes are different."
This brief dialogue with the head of state became the reason for long conversations in the villages that the mobile store truck serves.
Recalling the encounter with the president, Lyudmila said that she was overwhelmed at first, but in the end the conversation turned out to be easy, frank, businesslike. "Of course, I was nervous. It was the president, after all. But nerves calmed down. Everything was fine, wonderful. I had a conversation with the president, everything went well," Lyudmila Krisanova said. "Then, when I came to my villages [rural community on the route of the food truck] all people expressed their ‘wows’.
"Our man. He is our man, he is our president. I go to all the villages, and everyone says: only Lukashenko is our president, we don't need anyone. No one!" the woman added.
Conversations with customers are part of the job description. Just like laying out goods or calculating revenue at the end of the day. Lyudmila Krisanova has been working in retail for 37 years, and 25 of them in mobile retail. "When I started out, those were ordinary trucks. Then there were more advanced ones with refrigerating equipment. Then came more improved versions, with freezers," she said. The predecessor of the current mobile truck was a GAZ truck. According to the saleswoman, "it was not bad, but it ran its course", although it still runs. "It is still ‘strong’, still runs" and is used for the needs of the district consumers society.
The district residents know Lyudmila Krisanova as well as she knows them: “I am used to my mobile shop and to my people [customers]. It is my thing. I come to any village and I see people waiting for me as if I were their family. I have arrived today in the village of Gorbachevka to my people whom I feel related to.”
It is true that today such meetings at the mobile store truck are limited to small talk only. They used to be more atmospheric in the past. “Things were different in the past: you would come to any village and people would buy goods, take what they need, sit down and share some stories from the past, they could even sing songs. There used to be tables near mobile store trucks. The countryside was a beautiful place. But villages are withering, depopulating little by little. There are very few people in the countryside. There used to be different here,” Lyudmila Krisanova said.
She always stays positive - she knows that even now she is very welcome, especially in the places where there are only two or three residents live, and it is important for her to get there in any weather, even if the road is washed out. “We always come to these places. If there is no possibility to reach the destination in our mobile shop, we walk there. We try to visit every small village, bring food there. It can be difficult sometimes. An elderly woman approaching the mobile shop on crutches is a usual thing there. But they [the residents] are always happy to see us. They are waiting for us. How not come there? The mobile shop means everything for them,” Lyudmila emphasized. Today people in villages do not keep large farms, do not have big gardens, do not grow their own vegetables, fruits and berries. “Most of them are elderly. They wait for the mobile shop for a chance to buy eggs, sausage, meat products, and even stuffed cabbage. They buy dumplings. They are accustomed to this way of life,” Lyudmila Krisanova explained, adding that semi-finished products, such as chops, fresh lard, and shahsliks, have been quite popular lately.
According to her, the assortment of a modern mobile store truck is as good and varied as the one in a convenience store. More than 600 items of goods are available here. “The product offering expands every year. For example, we could not bring so much ice cream before. Today I take 250 ice cream bars, and they sell really well. People love ice cream,” Lyudmila said. There is a wide variety of industrial goods, vegetables, fruits, and groceries. The mobile store truck is equipped with refrigerators to keep sausage, dairy, fish products, confectionery. There is also a great variety of bakery products, at least 15-20 items, and all the bread is fresh and still warm. Lyudmila Krisanova starts her working day with a visit to the bakery. Then she spends some time solving organizational issues at the district consumers society, load the mobile store truck with goods and heads to the villages. “We have a strict schedule of visits to locations. We do not break the schedule. We do our best to stick to it. We visit some 9-11 villages with a population of 521 people every day. We have three different routes. There are 7-12 villages on the route,” the woman said about her daily routine.
“You can order anything in the mobile shop. Lyudmila is a great worker, our breadwinner,” customers say about Lyudmila Krisanova, which energizes and invigorates her for more accomplishments.
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