SHOPS AND SHOPPING It’s a well-known fact that we can’t imagine our life without shops. There are shops in cities, towns and small villages.
We can buy goods and food at different shops, supermarkets, department stores and markets. In cities and towns there are a lot of different food-shops. They are: baker’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, greengrocer’s, dairy, fishmonger’s.
At baker’s you can buy white and brown bread, rolls, cakes, buns, biscuits.
At butcher’s there is a wide choice of different sorts of meat: pork, veal, mutton, beef, poultry. Besides you can buy here different sausages, ham, smoked meat.
Greengrocer’s shops supply us with fruit and vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, onion, carrot, cabbage, dill, parsley, red-beet, garlic, apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, bananas, pine-apples, lemons, oranges, grapes, melons. So, you can choose whatever you want and need.
At grocer’s you can buy tea, coffee, sugar, salt, cereals, pasta, spices, soft drinks, sweets. At dairy the customers buy milk, sour-cream, cottage cheese, yoghurt, cheese, butter.
Not to go to different shops for food and household items people in big cities prefer to go to supermarkets. A supermarket is a very big shop. Usually people can buy food there. There are no shop-assistants, so when a customer goes into a supermarket, he gets a metal trolley for holding the things he wants to buy. When you have put your tins, packets and boxes of food into the trolley, you take them to the checkout point and pay the cashier.
The main advantages of buying things at the supermarket are: you save your time, there is a great variety of goods, and the food is cheaper than in a small shop.
But many people go to the market to do the shopping. The farmers sell vegetables, fruit, berries, flowers which they grow in their fields, gardens and vegetable gardens. They also sell meat, eggs, milk, butter, sour-cream, cottage cheese and other things. At the market you can bargain, hear the local news and communicate with a lot of people.
As for department stores they are popular all over the world. Large shops with a lot of departments are department stores. In a department store you can buy everything you want. In the shop windows you can see the things which they sell there.
In the department store there are such departments as:
Footwear stationery textile
Ready-made clothes perfumery household goods
Hat haberdashery toys and some others
At the footwear department you can buy shoes, boots, sandals.
If you want to buy a pair of trousers, jeans, a coat, a raincoat, a dress, a suit, a blouse, a shirt, a skirt you must go to the ready-made clothes department.
At the perfumery department the customers can buy shampoo, lipstick, soap, lash-colour, washing powder.
At the stationery department people buy exercise-books, pens, pencils, pads, rulers.
Children like to go to the toy department to look at or to buy different toys.
Recently there have appeared a lot of boutiques, which are very popular with people who are interested in the latest fashion and who want their clothes to be modern, unique and unordinary.
As for me I like (dislike) going shopping. As a rule I do my shopping at __________.