The Delightfully Direct Shop Signs of Muscat

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The Sale of Drinking Water shop

Mustcat, Oman, is a busy city of about one and a half million people. In districts like Al-Gubrah, it has wide, traffic-jammed boulevards lined with tall concrete buildings. There often isn’t any pavement but instead the side of the road is a car park for the shops on the ground floor. The sun was scorching when I visited in October and the temperature around 39c. Therefore, I wanted to stay in the shade as much as possible and that meant keeping close to the shop fronts. However, the more I walked around, the more amusing I found the names of the shops!

In Oman, it seems there is a template for shop signage. It has the shop’s brand name in Arabic in the middle, followed by an English translation below. On the top-left corner, is the registered company name in English and likewise in the right corner, its name in Arabic. But what piqued my interest were the incredibly literal names of the shops. Not only did the shops tend to be very specialised, but they also didn’t bother with any kind of branding like you see here in the West. Instead, it does what it says on the tin!

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This shop is located by the port in the district of Mutrah. Next to it was the Sale Of Beef shop and the Sale of Fish shop.

I suppose this is because the lack of large supermarkets hereThere were large supermarket chains, such as Carrefour, but they seemed to be on the edge of town and usually catered to the premium segment.

and affordable rent prices allows such shops to exist but it also seemed nice that people can drive or walk around their neighbourhood and shop at places more integrated into the local community.

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This shop is bold enough to sell more than one thing!

Most places also accepted cards so it was already more convenient than Germany ;)