"Every day is Christmas nowadays," the workers of Tesco in Mosonmagyaróvár tell each other. Their daily turnover is ten percent higher than what is usual around Christmas.  At night, seventeen of their staff fill the empty shelves, and they pack continuously, all day long. Even though there's an economic crisis, no one is made redundant here.  What's more, they've even started employing students.

We're half an hour's drive from Bratislava (Pozsony). For decades, it was the Hungarians who crossed the border to go shopping in Slovakia, which was then considered cheap. The Slovakian invasion started a few weeks ago and is due not only to the devaluation of the Hungarian currency, but also to the rising prices in Bratislava prior to the introduction of the Euro.

This situation is typical not only in North-Western Hungary, but all along the border between the two countries: for food they travel to the nearest towns, to Mosonmagyaróvár, Esztergom, and Sátoraljaújhely, for technical goods they travel further, to Győr and Miskolc. The invasion is so strong that each night the manager of the hypermarket in Mosonmagyaróvár takes off his jacket and starts packing goods. The store is full of customers even at eight o'clock on a Saturday night.  The town hasn't seen this many empty shelves since the 1970's.

"I work on the clothes department but I've been redirected to the food department. As you can see, although we've just filled up the coffee-shelves, by the time we return from the warehouse with a new pallet, the shelves are empty again," a shop assistant relates to an acquaintance of his. The local population has a hard time digesting all that is happening. Just eighteen months ago it was the other way around - they were the ones who went to Slovakia to buy petrol, eat dumplings and shop for food.

However, anyone who believes that the forint-crisis will boost borderline trade is wrong; the invasion of shoppers from Slovakia only affects the hypermarket. Neither the Slovakians nor the ethnic Hungarians living in Slovakia are impressed by the shopping street in Mosonmagyaróvár, developed from the 1980's onwards to meet the demands of Austrian tourists. Instead of shops, this street is full of hairdressers, restaurants and dentistries.

Visitors from Bratislava avoid the smaller shops and are only interested in large, multinational stores. There is a simple explanation for this: most of them do not speak Hungarian, and they can do their shopping without any difficulty in these supermarkets. For example, two huge widescreen television sets, three whole salamis - this is what we can see in the trolley next to ours. It's easy to tell the difference between domestic shoppers and those from across the border, for their trolleys are packed full to the brim.

Only the multinationals

"We're shopping for a private nursery school," Adrianna Fehér  tells us at the paper department. She lives in Bratislava, crosses the border once a week with her colleague and buys everything here from nappies to apples, from the lard of Mangalitsa pigs (curly-hair hogs) to Frankfurter sausages, that the 74 children attending the nursery school where they are also taught English, might need. Adrianna looks for the largest packs, as do the others. Toilet paper of better quality, for example, is offered not in packs of 24, but in large bulks six times that size. People are buying whole cartons of 4-8-kilogramme packets of washing-powder.

Department managers rush about between the aisles with radios in their hands, for it is difficult to calculate beforehand what people are going to buy more of. There is no single favourite product, like there was in the Austrian-Hungarian Gorenje-era, towards the end of the 1980's. Everything is cheap, very cheap indeed.

"Before the euro was introduced in Slovakia, our prices were about thirty percent lower than the Slovakian level. At the time, one euro was around 260-280 forints, now it's close to 310. It's easy to see why it's worth it for them to come here," a shop assistant of a technical store in the Árkád shopping center in Győr explains to us. "They're buying everything, washing machines, television sets, refrigerators. For them, shopping here is similar to there being a sale in all the shops, with the price of all goods being reduced by 40 percent," he adds, then swallows hard. "Actually, it's as if the whole country were on sale."

Many people arrive by buses, but most often a convoy of three or four cars drives into the parking lot, and there is usually at least one person among them who speaks Hungarian and does the interpreting. Still, when we ask Adrianna Fehér, in the food section, whether their knowledge of Hungarian has become more valuable due to the opportunity of bargain-shopping, she dismisses the question with a wave of the hand. Ethnic Hungarians of Slovakia are not happy about the dire straits of the mother-country.

Although seventy percent of the turnover of the technical department store in Győr comes from Slovakian shoppers, there are no signs or information sheets in Slovakian, neither here nor in Tesco. The staff are helpful and friendly, but they cannot speak a single word in the language of our northern neighbours.

"Is this butter?" a Slovak man asks in English, looking a bit lost after having spent minutes with the packet in his hand. He lives fifteen kilometers from Bratislava and has two small children; that is his explanation for buying eight two-liter bottles of fabric softener and a large amount of washing-powder that would be enough for the monthly consumption of a medium-sized launderette. "I don't do any selling on the side", he tells us.

Gooseliver instead of dumplings

It seems that others are doing just that. Judging by the number of five-liter bottles of cooking oil they pack into their cars, they might well be procuring goods for their restaurants from here.

"Saturday and Wednesday are the two most important days of the week, that's when the market is held in Győr. Sometimes, there's a whole row of buses from Slovakia standing in the parking lot," Attila Horváth Cs., the director of the thermal baths and aquapark in Győr tells us. The programme is usually as follows: a visit to the market, then the baths, then a pleasant walk in the Baroque city center, finally some shopping in the Árkád shopping center; it's not organised by the the baths, but they're happy about it, for nowadays every fourth or fifth guest is from Slovakia. There are signs in Slovakian in the thermal baths, and the staff can speak a few words of Slovakian, although it's true that bublina (bubble) is bubrinka, and uterák (towel) sounds like utyerák, but according to the lifeguard, Zsuzsa Sinka, they and their Slovakian guests have no problem understanding one another.

It is not only to Győr that our Slovakian neighbours come for a swim, many pop over to Mosonmagyaróvár after work. The locals have never seen anything like this: the parking lot is full of cars in the evening, those arriving from Slovakia - many of whom are ethnic Hungarians - take advantage of the fact that tickets are cheaper after five o'clock in the afternoon.

"It's not so much the price that counts, rather the quality," says Mónika Hackl, spokesperson for Tesco. This actually sounds quite strange, for it is because of the lower prices that they come to Hungary in the first place. Still, she may be right, for Sándor Takács, owner of the Paprika Inn in Hegyeshalom, says the same thing. "Don't think they come looking for cheap meals. Do you know what their favourite food is? Gooseliver." He continues with more surprising facts: his former Austrian customers can no longer afford spending the kind of money that the majority of Slovakians now can. There's an obvious explanation. While most of the Austrian guests are pensioners of modest means, in the case of the Slovakians it is the middle-class, intellectuals and company managers who come to visit.

Fine cooking is not all that is needed to cater for the large number of guests from Slovakia.  They have that in other retaurants too, yet you can't see diners from Bratislava elsewhere. The Paprika Inn is almost full on weekdays at lunchtime, even though it's not at the Slovakian border, but a few kilometers away by the Austrian border-crossing. István Takács maintains a hotline with a translation agency in Győr; now they have not only a menu in Slovakian, but also a slogan.

"We're advertising with the 300-forint euro," the owner tells us, and waves his hand as if to say: if only it were otherwise.

Although even the wooden carvings in the restaurant are red-white-and-green, contrary to the usual practice of the days preceding the Hungarian national holiday of March 15th, the restaurant's staff are not yet wearing a cockade. István Takács says this new custom will perhaps continue, for there is nothing for us to be proud of, and it's as if their Slovakian guests were reminding them of this each day. It's a strange ambivalency, for they appreciate those arriving from Slovakia, it is thanks to them that only fifteen of the huge restaurant's eighty employees had to be made redundant. Owing to the economic crisis, the migrant workers from Western Europe who used to be the restaurant's most important guests, no longer come, for they were among the first to lose their jobs.

We're in trouble

"Oh, they don't have forints," explains the lady in one of the lavatories of the shopping center in Győr. It costs fifty forints to use the toilets, but not everyone pays that much. "The Slovakians don't change money, they pay with bankcards in shops, and they throw me a one eurocent coin. I let them use the toilet, what can I do?" she asks. It's true that they dont' bother much with forints and pay in euros with bankcards, even if they get a worse exchange rate for their money.

The queues at the checkout are quite long in Tesco too, because so many people pay with bank cards. Two men in pink shirts explain to each other in Czech, using wide gestures, which type of cheese they prefer, and buy about 10-15 boxes of the said product. They're businessmen and have been here several times, they inform us. When we ask them whether they'd be willing to help us and allow us to take a photo of them, they pretend to misunderstand the question:

"Well, your country could certainly do with some help," one of them tells us. The other man appreciates the joke and they both laugh loudly. And we think they would surely be hurt if they knew that in Hungarian, when someone's in trouble, we say to them: you're in a Czech state.

 Border(line) cases

Austria  
The currency rate of over 300 forints for a euro has brought back some of the formerly loyal Austrian customers. At weekends they once again fill the more elegant restaurants. Besides dentists, the new plastic surgeons are becoming more and more popular.

Romania 
It is not the weakening of the forint that is attracting them to the shops near the border, but rather the greater choice of goods. In villages by the border, property that has lost its value because of the economic crisis is now being bought up.

Serbia and Croatia
Shopping tourism is considerable, but this is independent of the forint's devaluation, and affects mostly the multinationals, for people are mainly looking for shopping centers that they lack back home.

Slovenia 
The citizens of the first former Socialist country to have the euro as its currency are primarily looking for agricultural investment opportunities.

Ukraine
Due to the lower prices in Ukraine, it is still the Hungarians who travel there with the intention of shopping and smuggling. Ukranians can only move within fifty kilometres of the border without a visa, so it is primarily petrol, cigarettes and alcohol that they bring across the border illegally. They purchase flats in Nyíregyháza, not as private individuals, but rather through their companies.