Transcription
Well, hello and welcome to this English lesson about shopping. Shopping is something that we all do in order to live, in order to go through your day. You have to buy things every once in a while. We need to buy food. We need to buy clothes. We need to buy houses if we live in houses. Um, we have to buy a car if we need to drive to work. So shopping, the act of taking your money and exchanging that money for something, is very, very common. These are usually very popular English lessons. Whenever I talk about shopping, people are quite interested. So please enjoy this lesson about shopping where you'll learn lots of words and phrases that we use as English speakers when we go shopping.
Before we get started, I do want to mention there is a study pack for this lesson. If you go to BobtheCanadian.com, you can find that study pack, and there's also a link in the description below. That study pack has all of the original slides, a crossword puzzle, a word search, a matching activity, a multiple choice activity. It has a lot of support materials that you can use as an independent English learner, or if you're an English teacher, you can use them in your classroom. So if you're interested, please head over to BobtheCanadian.com and look for that.
So the general term for someone who buys things is shopper. When you go to the mall, you will see lots of shoppers. Um, when I go to the—I'm a shopper. So a shopper is a person who is engaged in the act of shopping. So if I take my wallet—I seem to have lost my wallet. Oh, it's over there—and I go to a store and I buy something, I am a shopper. Um, I'm similar to the person in the chat. I think it was RightWinter. I don't go to the mall without knowing what I want to buy. So I'm a very focused shopper. I don't just wander around and buy things randomly. But the person who buys things is a shopper.
And there's two ways to talk about the act of shopping. We can say shop, like you just—the verb—to shop, or to go shopping. So I could say this: Tomorrow I'm going to shop at the mall, or tomorrow I'm going to go shopping at the mall. Both sentences work. Both are completely correct. And this is the verb we use to talk about buying things. So if you go to the mall, you're going to the mall to shop, or you're going to the mall to go shopping. We also sometimes say to do some shopping. I need to do some shopping this weekend. I need new shoes and a new pair of shorts.
Now there's a few different kinds of shopping. And we just add the word in front to describe it. If I need food, I go grocery shopping. So I go to the grocery store or supermarket, and I go grocery shopping. I might say to Jen, "I need to do a bit of grocery shopping after school today. Is there anything we need?" If I need clothes, I would go clothes shopping. Jen and the kids really like going clothes shopping. I think everyone likes to have new clothes. So we go clothes shopping. Not a lot, but it's probably one of the more common things that we shop for. So if you need food, you go food shopping or you go grocery shopping. Sorry, if you go grocery shopping. If you need clothes, you go clothes shopping. If you need a car, you can actually go car shopping as well. So car shopping is something that you do when you need to buy a car. You might go to a couple of different places to look at the cars they have. We call those places car dealerships. So you might go to three or four different car dealerships on a Saturday to do some car shopping. You're going to figure out which car you want. You're going to decide which car you are going to buy.
So notice as well, shopping doesn't always involve actually buying something. So I can go shopping at the mall and come home and say, "I bought some shoes." I can also go shopping at the mall and come home and say, "I didn't buy anything." So both are equally correct. So I guess you don't technically have to buy something to be—to go shopping. And then you can go house shopping. Um, so if you want to buy a house, you don't buy the first house you see. In Canada, you would call someone called a realtor. And a realtor is someone who will take you and show you different houses. They will take you house shopping. And then you can see a few different houses. You can decide on what house you like, and you can buy one that you feel comfortable living in. So very nice. Jen and I didn't ever do this. We didn't go house shopping because we bought our house from my mom.
And then there's, of course, online shopping, a relatively new kind of shopping. Online shopping is shopping that you do on your computer, uh, or on your phone. Um, so you decide you need to buy concert tickets. You go on your phone and you buy concert tickets. Maybe you want to buy a new computer. So you go on your phone and you do some online shopping and you buy a new computer. So online shopping—another way to spend money to buy things. Now I should have changed this picture. I should have found a picture with paper grocery bags. In Canada, when you buy groceries, when you buy food at the grocery store or supermarket, they now put them in paper bags, or you need to bring your own bags. I always bring my own bags. We do not have plastic grocery bags in my part of Ontario, Canada anymore. They're just not allowed. So we decided that plastic bags are not allowed anymore. There are no plastic bags. So I should have changed this picture to something a little more current. Now if you go to the grocery store, if you need bags, they will give you paper bags, and they will charge you 10 cents for each bag. So you do have to pay for the bags now. We're doing it for the environment. Um, plastic bags are not good for the environment.
We also have shopping bags. And there's less of these now too. People are more likely to just carry their items. Or people might get one bag at the first store they shop at, one shopping bag, and then use that for the rest of their shopping trip. We'll do that sometimes. We'll buy something at a store at the mall, and they'll give us a big shopping bag. And then at each—each store we go to after that, we'll just keep putting the things in the first shopping bag because we don't need—well, like this lady has too many shopping bags. That stuff could have all fit in one or two bags, I think, and I think that would have been a little bit better.
Then, of course, we have price, and you find the price on the price tag. So the price is what the vendor or store or salesperson has decided they want to sell the item for, how much money they want for the item. So if you look here, this kale is $2, or three for $5. That's a pretty good price actually. Um, you eat kale. It's quite healthy, by the way. We grow kale in our garden along with the flowers. Um, and then we usually let it freeze once or twice outside before we harvest it. But anyways, price is what you pay for an item. And if it is a tag, like if it's hanging like this, this is just the price written on a card or a piece of paper. But this is an actual price tag, a little piece of paper hanging from the article of clothing or hanging from the thing that you want to buy, telling you how much it costs.
And then if you want to pay, you can pay with cash or money. Um, we use the word cash a lot in my part of the world. So Jen might say, "Hey, do you—can you pay for this? Do you have cash on you?" And what she's saying is, "Do you have actual, like, bills in your wallet? Do you have $5 bills, $20 bills, $50 bills?" And I'll say, "Yeah, yeah, I have money. I brought money with me," or "I have cash." The other way to pay is, of course, with a gift card. So a gift card is a card for a specific store, and it basically has a certain amount of money on it. I actually have an Amazon gift card. I have one right here. I'm not going to show you the back because if I think—if you can see the code, you could steal it. So this is an Amazon gift card. Hopefully this focuses. And it says on the back, "$25." Well, it's not bad. Sometimes my kids give me Amazon gift cards, um, like they get them as a gift, and then I order something from Amazon. I do some online shopping. And then they give me the gift card to pay me back.
You can also pay with a credit card or a debit card. And these work slightly differently. A credit card—basically, they send you a bill every month. A debit card takes the money straight from your bank account and gives it to the store. So let me repeat: If you have a Visa card or a Mastercard, when you use that—pay by sliding it or tapping it or inserting it and punching in your code—you are actually—Visa's actually paying for your stuff, and then Visa charges you interest, and you have to pay them back. A debit card—the money simply comes straight out of your bank account. It's always better to pay with a debit card, 'cause then you're not borrowing money in order to buy something.
Coupons are pieces of paper that help you get a deal or something cheaper at a store. So there might be a coupon in a newspaper or on a—in a flyer, and it simply says, "25% off. Bring this coupon to the store. Buy whatever you want. We'll give you 25% off." When you're buying things online, there often can be discount codes. If you punch this discount code in, you will get a certain percentage off, or you can buy two things for the price of one with a discount code.
Grocery store—at—supermarket. So we use both words here in Canada. When you talk about the store that you go to to buy food, we would call it a grocery store or a supermarket. I often use the word grocery store. I think it might be very Canadian. I know I'm going to say—on the supermarket. In French, I think you say Super Marché, which is the French equivalent of supermarket. Um, if someone says the word supermarket, I know what they mean. It's just not a word that I use very commonly. I often just say grocery store. "Hey, I'm going to go to the grocery store today." Um, "Hey, kids, I'm going to the grocery store after work. Is there anything you want me to buy?"
We also have malls, which are—that's the short form for shopping mall. A shopping mall is a large building with many, many stores inside. Shopping malls, by the way, are really nice places to go in the winter in Canada. When it's minus 20 degrees outside, it can be fun to just go to the shopping mall to do some shop—to shop—to go shopping, um, even if you don't need to buy anything or want to buy anything, because they're big enough that you can—you can walk quite a bit, like you can walk—if you walked the entire shopping mall, it might be a whole kilometer of walking. So I have, in the past, on really cold days, if I want to get some steps in for my fitness tracker, I might go with Jen to the mall and do some walking. But a mall sometimes has two floors or three floors. You can see here there's an escalator that people are going up and down. Um, and a mall just has like 100 or 200 stores. It's a great place to go if you need to go to a variety of stores to buy things. You go to the shopping mall, or what we just usually call the mall.
So some people ask sometimes, "What's the difference between a store and a shop?" So in North America, stores are generally bigger. When I use the word shop, I'm often talking about like a nice little store in a town. Um, but that being said, it is interchangeable. You could say, "There's some really cute shops at the mall." "There's some really cute stores at the mall." So again, for me as a Canadian, and I think in North America, stores usually means something a bit bigger, and a shop is something a little bit smaller. Um, the street where the farmers market is, there's a—there's some nice shops on that street. There's also some big stores on that street. So it's not a hard and fast rule. Like it's just kind of how Bob uses it. But I wouldn't use the word shop to talk about a really, really big store that sells tools. I would call that a store, a hardware store actually. So for me, store and shop have to do with size. I think in the UK, shop is a more common way to talk about stores.
So shopping cart. By the way, this is called a trolley, I think, in the UK. If you're learning British English, you're on the wrong channel. But that's okay. You can stay. We call this a shopping cart or a grocery cart or just a cart. So when I go to the grocery store, I go and get a cart. I go get a grocery cart before I start shopping. Now you are probably familiar though with the word shopping cart, or the word—because when you do online shopping, we still use this term. When you buy something on Amazon, it goes into your shopping cart. It goes into your cart, uh, even though it's a virtual cart. Um, but yes, I would call this a shopping cart. Again, if you are on the other side of the Atlantic, if you are in Britain, you would probably call this a trolley. I think that's what they call it. We just call it grocery cart. Seems simpler to me.
When you go to a store, it's always fun when things are on sale or when the store has a sale. Let me use those two terms again. A store can have a sale. So you might say, "Oh, that store is having a sale. A lot of stuff is on sale." So notice I'm using it differently. The store has a sale. There is a sale at that store. The stuff in the store is on sale. Usually in Canada, all of the summer clothing is on sale in September. They know that it's hard to sell bathing suits and T-shirts in the winter. And in the—a lot of the winter clothing is on sale. The store will have a sale, and the winter clothes will be on sale in March and April, because they would rather sell the—the winter clothes instead of keeping—keeping all the winter clothes through the summer.
So this has a lot of names. But when you are at a store or shop, when you are done shopping, you need to pay for things. So you need to find the till or the checkout or the register or the cash register or the counter or the front counter. We have a number of different words for it. The most common is probably checkout, okay? So, if I was buying, let's see here. If I was buying this pair of glasses, I would need to find the till or the checkout or the cash register or the front counter in order to pay for these. And the most common word would be checkout. And it's also the verb. "Oh, I need to checkout. I need to find the checkout. I can checkout." Usually though you would say, "I need to find the checkout so I can pay for all of this stuff." Um, yeah. Welcome to English. Sometimes there's lots of different words for things.
Uh, and then now we have—this is where the updated part of the lesson comes in. We have a lot more stores with self-checkout. This is becoming more and more common in Canada. Almost every grocery store that I go to now has self-checkout. Okay. Self-checkout is when you walk up to one of these machines, which we call the self-checkout machine, or just the self-checkout. And then you scan your items yourself. So you go like, "Beep," and then you put it on the—on the—on the little—I think a scale. I think these machines weigh everything, and then the machine knows if you're lying or cheating. Um, but self-checkout is becoming much more popular in Canada. Um, we see it almost in every grocery store now. I—I don't mind it. It's—if you're in a hurry, it's kind of nice. And there's also stores—Now I have not seen a store like this, but I watched a video—maybe these are more popular in Europe and other parts of the world—where when you go grocery shopping, you get a cart and you get a scanner, and as you shop, you scan the items with the scanner, and then at the end you—you just pay and you're done. Like it's kind of a different way of doing self-checkout. Kind of similar though. If you have this in your country, let me know in the chat if you use scanners in your country.
And then there's two kinds of people at a store. There's a cashier. This is the person who works at the checkout, the person who works at the till. And then we have a store clerk. This is someone who helps you in the store. So if you are done shopping, you go to the checkout, and the cashier will ring up—we still use that. I never thought about that. She'll ring up your total. There's no ringing anymore. But she will scan each item and tell you how much money you need to pay. If though I am in a clothing store or I'm in a grocery store and I can't find something, I might ask a store clerk. I'm at—I might ask a clerk to help me find the bananas, for instance. "Hey, could you tell me where the bananas are?" That's something I might say to a clerk. So the cashier will check you out. The cashier will ring in or scan in all your items and then tell you how much you owe, and the clerk will help you find things.
Now Jen and I talked about this one. We often just refer to a clerk as a worker. Like if I'm in a store and if I have a question, I might say, "Have you seen a worker?" Um, "If you see a store worker, let me know," and I—because I want to ask them something. But clerk is definitely the correct term for sure.
Receipt. So a receipt is a piece of paper you get after you buy something. Some stores now send you a receipt via email. But usually when I go to my grocery store, when I'm done buying groceries, they give me a little piece of paper. It comes out of the cash register, and they hand it to me, and it tells me how much money I spent, and it has a list of all the things that I buy. When I go to the grocery store and get groceries and also buy myself a chocolate bar, sometimes Jen looks at the receipt later in the day and she says, "You bought a chocolate bar? Did you get me one?" So it's important to know what to do with your receipt. Also, when I buy something for our business, I keep the receipt because we want to enter the amount we spent into our accounting software. When you run a business, it's important to keep your receipt, so if the government ever asked you what you spent, you would have proof of what you spent, and then you want to keep it as well in case you want to do a return or an exchange. If you buy flowers from us and if they die the next day—which never happens—you should come back to the market the next week, and we will either give you a return—we will give you your money back—or you can exchange it for a new bouquet of flowers. This happens quite regularly. I actually had a pair of shoes once, and when I bought them, they didn't fit. I bought them online, and they were the right size, but they still felt really tight. So, I brought them to the actual store. The store sells online, and they have a store, and I returned them, and they gave me my money back. I wanted to exchange them for a pair that was a little bit bigger, but they didn't have them. So a return is when you bring it back and they give you money. An exchange is when you bring it back and they give you something else from the store. Shoes are a great example. If you buy size nine and a half and they don't fit, you might want to exchange them for size ten. And you should bring your receipt, by the way. If you don't
Have your receipt; you can't return or exchange stuff. Sometimes, you just want a refund, okay? So, a refund is the name we give for when they give you money back. So, when you return something, they give you a refund. When you buy something, you give them money. When you return something, they give you a refund. They give you your money back.
Sometimes, customers get angry in a store, and they want a refund. They demand a refund. Like, I want a refund. This is ridiculous. This shoe broke the first time I wore it. I'm never buying shoes here again. That's what an angry customer might say.
When we talk about hours, we're talking about not just when the stores open during the day, but what days they're open. So if someone said to Jen and I, "What are your hours?" Actually, we don't have hours. Let me, let me give a better example. If I went to the hardware store and I said to the store clerk, "What are your hours?" He would say, "Oh, we're open Monday through Saturday, eight to six." So you can see here: opening hours Tuesday to Friday 7:30 AM to 5 PM, Saturday 8 AM to 5 PM. So again, we use the word "hours," but it refers to the days and the time during those days that a store is open. Some stores are open twenty-four hours. There you go.
We also have delivery and shipping. Let me kind of explain the difference here. Delivery is the act of bringing something to someone's house or apartment, okay? So when you order pizza, it comes with free delivery. They bring it to your house. Um, the act of coming in your driveway, walking up to your door, and giving you a pizza is delivery. Okay. So when you buy a mattress, sometimes you need delivery because the mattress doesn't fit in your car. And so you need delivery.
Shipping is similar. Shipping is when something leaves a store, and the time from when it leaves your store to when it gets to your house. That's the shipping process. And so we kind of use these interchangeably, though. They're very, very similar. In fact, sometimes you get free delivery. Sometimes you get free shipping, and it means the same thing. Okay. But generally, delivery is the act. Like when the person is at my house, he's making a delivery. But when I pay for shipping, I'm paying for the item to leave the store, travel down the road, and come to my house. I didn't explain that very well. They are kind of the same thing. But there is kind of a slight difference. Maybe someone in the chat can explain it a little bit better. But sometimes something is too big, and you need to pay for delivery or you need to pay for shipping.
Sometimes you want to buy some clothes. Maybe you need to buy a new pair of pants. You need to buy a few shirts, and you go to a clothing store to do some clothes shopping. And you want to try things on. And so you would ask, "Where are the fitting rooms or where are the change rooms?" So a fitting room is a small place like this where you can go and take your shirt off and put on the new shirt and see how it fits. Look in a mirror and see how it looks, and then decide if you want to buy it or not.
Uh, then at the mall, sometimes you are hungry. And so malls have what are called food courts. So a food court is a place where there are many restaurants and lots of tables and chairs to sit at. And you can decide, "Oh, today I'd like a hamburger. Today I'd like a wrap. Today I'd like french fries with gravy. Today I'd like pizza. Today I'd like some samosas. Today I'd like an empanada. Today I'd like to have some pierogies." There's so many options at a food court. So you kind of look around and decide, "Hm, what looks the best? What am I craving?" When you crave something, it's what you want to eat. And then you order it. Usually when I go to the food court, I usually get pizza. Sometimes I get a hamburger.
Uh, and then a couple of terms to finish off here: in stock and out of stock. Let me make these a little bit bigger. When a store has something in stock, it means that they have that item. Okay, so you can see here this cleaner is in stock. If you look at the shelf, you can see that there are bottles of cleaner there. Above, though, there are no bottles. So they are out of stock. So when something is in stock, it means it's something the store sells and they have it in the store. When it's out of stock, it's something the store normally sells, but they don't have any in the store at this time. So when something goes on sale, the store sometimes has lots of that item in stock. But sometimes something's on sale, and then very quickly they're out of stock. They just don't have anymore. It's disappointing when you go to a store to buy something that's on sale and they say, "Sorry, we're out of stock," or "We sold out this morning." That would be another way to put it. Uh, and then you can of course ask for something called a rain check. That means when the product is back in stock, you can come and pay the price that you would have paid when it was on sale. Anyways, when something's in stock, it means they have it. When something's out of stock, it means they no longer have it. They have sold out. There are none left on the shelf.