Juan Vicente Bañuls Sala and his supermarket
As a tourist from North America visiting Costa Blanca, I consider myself lucky to have discovered Calpe and its surroundings. One day in need of food supplies, I walked into the Ortenbach Supermarket. I said, “Hola,” then behind me 5 seconds later a man comes into the market, and as he is turning to face the checkout counter, the clerk behind it in quickly places two items in front of him. The man picks them up, pays, and as he walks out, I think he said, “adiós.” No other word was exchanged.
I stood there for a moment trying to make sense of the quick but strange sale. If you are like me, you want to know how did the grocer know what the customer wanted, right?
A week or so later, I return to buy some bread and salad items, and I see Juan, again ‘guessing’ what a customer wants, no words spoken. I thought, perhaps they are calling him beforehand or emailing. No, this is not what was happening.
Welcome to the store that Juan Vicente Bañuls Sala has owned and operated since 1978. Most of his customers are older folks—retired Germans, English, Belgians, and others—so perhaps they always buy the same thing, and that is why Juan knows what they want. Wrong again. One day, I see a local young man rush in, out of breath, and Juan quickly grabs a pack of cigarette, but not just any pack but a certain brand. The customer pays, and in a flash he is gone.
Juan is a truly unusual man. He not only remembers what many of his customers want, but he can converse English with a Brit, German with a Bavarian, and French with a Belgian or someone from Bordeaux. He can also converse in Dutch, and naturally Italian, Catalan, Valenciano, and Spanish (and in a pinch, Portuguese).
“So, you studied languages,” I asked?
“Yes, every foreign customer who comes here gives me private lessons,” he says laughing, “but the one language I don’t understand is Russian.”
Juan was born on April 4, 1960. His family is local, going back generations. “My father was a taxi driver,” Juan says, “and had a friend, a professor who had a house outside town and occasionally needed taxi service. He told my father that he or someone should build a supermarket in the area (where it is now), because the location was going to be built up soon.” Juan was already working in a supermarket in town during summertime since he was twelve or thirteen, though he did odd jobs like making leather bags, grilling chickens, and working in wine cellars since he was ten.
“My father did not have much money but at the time, 1977, banks charged 25 percent interest, so getting a bank loan was a non-starter. The way of doing business back then was different. A handshake was good enough of a contract; you could pay as you go, so much a month or other arrangement. The way we started building then you cannot replicate today, ‘con una deuda total’ (100 percent in debt). But that’s how it was.
“For example, my father owned a piece of ground that we had used for many years, but one day we realized that we had no deeded papers for it. It had been a handshake deal many years ago between my father and the seller. In the end, drawing the official paperwork was no problem, because the seller’s family had no objections.
“Somehow my father decided to go ahead with the idea (of establishing the supermarket).” The ground cost 1 million pesetas, and young Juan contributed with his own savings of 600,000 pesetas. The ground was full of brush and it had to be burnt and cleaned before work could begin, but the English owner of the house in the corner was not too happy. The area was wild and the maximum number of houses was at most twenty.
“Ever since we put up a sign of ‘Supermarket Coming Soon’, construction of houses went crazy. In a month, a new house was built with just four workers working. In one year, more than 100 houses were built in this area. People worked at ‘destajo’, overtime, and they poured the cement walls in a couple of days.
“The (store) building was finished in 1978 when I was exactly eighteen. I have been here ever since. The original market had the entrance in the middle of the building, changed later to the north side. In the first few years, we sold a lot of merchandise, but we could hardly keep up with the payments we owed. Luckily, the professor loaned us 500,000 pesetas at 10 percent interest, which was lifesaving.
“The first checkout counter was a board sitting on blocks. The cash machine was the clunky chunk of metal that you had to push each number and then draw a lever to register the transaction.
“In the early years, 80 to 90 percent of the foreigners arriving were Dutch, so I learned Dutch first. The reason was that the developer had a business connection in Holland. Next came the Germans, most were retired and spent winters here and returned home for the summer; they rented their houses to the summer tourists. Then the English came with their expensive pound and they bought a lot. Recently, a few Norwegians and Finnish people as well as Russians have arrived, and they are attracting other countrymen.”
Whenever they and others have a question or a problem with water, the roof, or the yard, they come to Juan for information. The postal boxes are next to the supermarket as well, so Juan deals with the packages that arrive. In summary, he is like an information centre and his supermarket is a clearinghouse for the Ortenbach neighbourhood.
Juan knows so much—if not everything—of what is going on in the area! He is also the personification of that earlier handshake generation when people were more neighbourly and trustworthy. The result is that many of his customers appreciate his helpfulness so much that they become real friends with him. One such couple comes to get groceries from Moraira, a town 11 kilometres away, even though they have a dozen closer supermarkets. There is more, people from Switzerland, Italy, France, and even the mayor of Bordeaux, among others, have invited him to their homes for vacation, and Juan has had good times with them. The mayor of Bordeaux took a week off just to show Juan y his wife many parts of France. Juan says that he felt totally at home with these people, but at the same time expresses surprise at receiving such treatment from them.
“Juan, you are not average,” I tell him, and he laughs.
I have little difficulty in understanding the trust and friendship of these foreigners in Ortenbach toward Juan, a man who believes in service and lives it, and this is something a foreigner truly appreciates. To me, Juan simply is the right man, at the right time, and at the right place for them. The most touching example of this, one that as Juan was describing it I could see that he was visibly moved, was about a ninety-one-year old German who arrived in Calpe with an RV and who told him the greatest thing that happened to him was first to see the rock Ifach, and then meet him, Juan.
Apparently, when he arrived in town he knew his life was coming to an end. He had several credit cards and he trusted Juan to withdraw cash. The doctor used Juan as an intermediary to communicate with the German, who gave him a list of phone numbers to call after he died. The first number was Juan’s own. The second was his son’s. The German instructed him, “You don’t have to call the first number because it is yours; so, call the second number, my son, and no one else.”
At this moment, Juan stops to reflect for a second and says, “How is this possible? (That is, that people treat him and trust him like this). Then, as a way of comprehending, he says, “of course we all know that in order to harvest you must first sow.”
Juan also remembered an older couple that befriended him. One day the wife called to inform him that her husband had committed suicide, and that the undertaker wanted €4,000 in order to proceed with his cremation, which by law had to be done within 24 hours. Of course, she didn’t have the cash in hand and getting it from their home bank would take longer. In other words, she was asking Juan for a loan. He understood the situation and helped. No problem.
After forty-one years, Juan understands and deals with many cultural idiosyncrasies. Still he doesn’t necessarily understand all of them, for example, the funerals. “When someone dies in Calpe we cry for a month,” he says, “but among some foreigners, after the body is dispensed of, they go out to a bar restaurant and celebrate.” Juan has a hard time understanding this, or the fact that their family values are quite different.
However, as a way of explaining to me his openness to foreigners and their ideas, Juan brings up his father’s example, how he went out of town to find his bride, from Moraira, 11 kilometres away. “Back then,” he says, “people did not travel far, so they married people from the same village or town.” Then he adds another detail from a generation apart: His grandmother from Moraira would come every week to La Cometa (a neighbourhood of Calpe where the Banyuls lived) with a donkey loaded with foodstuff. Who even thinks of doing that today?
I would like to end my story of Juan by mentioning that he has two brothers, one of them, Bernat, is a historian who in collaboration with others has recently published a book on local history. The Bañuls Family has a long connection with the historical site Ermita de Sant Joan in La Cometa neighbourhood. It is no coincidence that Juan in his daily interactions with his customers in 2019 has maintained deep-seated traditions of trust, service, and neighbourliness.