Last week, I was shopping at the Asia Mekong grocery store in Hamburg, Germany. I was sooo happy to find a store with lots of hard-to-find food items from the Far East. So, as I had done in other grocery stores earlier that day, I whipped out my iPhone and started taking notes of what’s fresh and available today… a small little inventory of items that I could refer to when at home thumbing through my recipe books. Two young Vietnamese girls offered to help me find anything I was looking for. I told them I was just looking around. After an hour or so, after happily browsing every aisle, I bought a few items and left. Today, the owner’s wife approached me and asked what I was doing. I told her I was shopping. She asked what I was doing with my device. I showed her my iPhone pointed to a browser with a recipe for Tom Yum Goong and said I was surfing the internet. Then she asked me what I was doing to her food items. She said the workers claimed I had been in there several times last week (a lie, I was only there once) and was doing something to her food items with my device, my iPhone. I told her I was making a list of what is available to reference later when I’m looking through my cookbook. She left. A few minutes later, her husband approached me and told me not to write down prices. I insisted I was not writing down prices, only making a list.

Can you explain what might be going on here? I was really offended after being accused of doing something bad when I was innocent.

I wasn’t writing down prices. Regardless, prices in a public store are public information. Even if I was writing down prices, I have to right to write them down. It’s not illegal to do so here in Germany.

What in the world were they afraid of? Any ideas?