Can you imagine a city that only has stores? A city with no services? No plants or dogs? No restaurants? A city with 3000 stores, to be exact? 3000 stores that only sell in bulk? With merchandise that is shipped to other countries free of tariffs and taxes? A gigantic free trade zone?

Today we went to the city of Colon, which is a port city located on the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal. We went into the Free Trade Zone and walked the streets with our mouths open. It is like a huge city, only for shopping. And big time shopping.

We went into several stores, of all sizes, and every single store had tables with calculators and clip-boards on them. Most stores have a minimum amount of merchandise that buyers can ship to their stores in another country, consequently retail sales are not permitted. For example, a small shoe store would only permit sales of a minimum of 33 pairs, and the most that store ever sold was 3000 pairs. Another example, a huge department store, with no dressing rooms obviously, only permits the sales of a minimum of 7-dozen of each item. They looked like regular stores, displaying their products, but there was no cash registrar.

And all of these items leave Panama free of charge, thus no exporting fees, but the recipient country does charge import feeds.

The Free Trade Zone employs 14000 Panamanians.

How can I describe the Colon Free Trade Zone? A city purely based on buying. Materialism. Commerce. Capitalism. Trade. Money. Corruption. Weird. So weird. Just so strange.

Hmmm….