Grocery or just “groceries shopping” is buying food and all the American buy their food at a supermarket, “supermarket” is a place that sells different foods, if you walk into an American supermarket, usually you will notice how big it is, it’s a very large supermarket that we have.
many years ago when I was a child, back before the telephone, I remember going to a little grocery store in our neighborhood, you could walk a couple of blocks maybe four or five streets, four or five blocks and there will be a small grocery store and this is very popular, you could buy something, you could buy milk and meat and certain canned goods, “canned” means things in the can like soup for example. And this was very popular but over the last thirty years or so, most of these small stores or many of them have disappeared, you don’t see them, you will still see them in New York city, in Manhattan which is the name of downtown area of New York city, but in Los Angels these are not common.
So now we have these very large supermarkets and most of them are what we call chain stores, a “chain store” is a store that is owned by a big company, that usually several, maybe dozen or hundred of these stores. When you walk into the supermarket of course you need to get a shopping cart, and the “cart” is where you put your food in. in my local supermarket the bakery section is right when you walk in the door and of course the idea is that they want you to buy some of the bake goods, the cookies is that sort of thing, the cakes before you get to the real food which are the vegetables and meat and so forth. Most people go shopping maybe once a week, this means of course that the food is not always as fresh as you may want it. In some countries, people go for example to the bakery every day and buy bread, but in the United States it’s very rare for people to go to a bakery to buy bread, most of people buy bread in the supermarket and usually the bread is already cut, you will say the bread is already sliced, to “slice” means to cut, usually to cut something in thin piece. So the bakeries are common here but most of them don’t make their money selling bread every day, they make their money selling cakes and other sort of cookies and other things that are popular. Many of bakeries now in order to make money also have become cafés or coffee shops where people can go and eat and drink and read that sort of thing, many of the bakeries make most of their money on other things other than typically bread.
Similarly very few people buy their meat at a separate place where we used to call the butcher’s shop and the “butcher” is the person that cuts the meat in a store, there are still some independent individual butcher’s store in the United States, here in Los Angels I used to live near one but again not very common. the same is true for fish, people don’t buy their fishes at a separate store, that usually go to the supermarket .
Now there are actually in Los Angels what we call farmer’s market and these are places where you can buy vegetables and fruit and usually a few other things from people who grow them or from the farmers themselves. and yes there are farmers here in California, many farmers. like California produces a lot of cheeses and fruits and vegetables, so some of these people come into the cities and they sell their foods and vegetables and usually it’s fresher to get them from the farmer’s market but it’s also a little bit more expensive sometimes. These farmer’s markets move around to different parts of the city on different days, so you will find the farmer’s market over here on one day and then in the different place on the next day. I have been to the farmer’s market a couple of times and I like going there, the food is often very good, better than what you can buy in the grocery store but it’s still not the most common way that people purchase their food or do their groceries shopping in the United States.
