Fun and informative! Fun facts about English delivered weekly right to your inbox. Fill in your email address below. Privacy policy: we will not sell, rent, or give your name or address to anyone.
You can unsubscribe at any point. Search This Blog. Friday, March 20, It's gross: why do we call them groceries? A friend of mine recently asked why we can only shop for groceries, not for a single grocery. She was inspired to ask this question by her three-year-old son, who had remarked, when she came out of a store bearing a single loaf of bread, that she had bought "a grocery".
Children are so logical when they are learning language: they acquire a pattern, and apply it. Just wait till the poor kid learns he has to change the singular -y to an -ies for the plural, and that even though your shopping list has several groceries on it and the No Frills sells many groceries, we still speak of a "grocery" list and a "grocery" store.
Sigh, English is so illogical. For that matter, why do we even call food and household supplies " groceries "? Here are the Oxford English Dictionary 's definitions for "grocer": One who buys and sells in the gross , i.
They see people shouting in grocery stores, unwilling to wear a mask to keep us all safe. For groceries, people want to know if they can buy online and pick up in-store.
A full month after falling ill, she attempted to go to grocery shopping and ended up in bed for days. The police learned that Kemp worked in a grocery on Decatur Avenue. Here they are semi-touching at a grocery store; she likes kombucha.
He was born in an apartment above the grocery store owned by his immigrant parents in South Jamaica, Queens. In 17th-century American English, the word was naturally extended as a name for the stores that sell groceries.
There's still in store some shirts, women's hose, and some bales of coarse cloth, with a parcel of hats and shoes; the best wares are disbursed for provisions … many of which were sold by me for Wampum Almost all the roads leading to a town in America are full of houses on their sides, called "taverns," or "liquor," "beer and cake," or "grocery," stores. Jarboe was aroused from his reverie on the closing of the grocery.
This use of the word faded away by the midth century while grocery referring to a store got supersized. By the end of the century, grocery store chains began to emerge, and in a firm in the state of Montana patented groceteria based on cafeteria for a self-service grocery store in which shoppers picked items themselves.
The concept of the groceteria was fully realized a few years later and revolutionized the grocery store business. This new grocery store was the precursor to the supermarket , which began popping up across the United States in the s.
It should be noted that across the pond establishments called superstores —large supermarkets or department stores—were in business almost two decades prior to the American supermarket. Originally intended to allow a single clerk to oversee sometimes more than a dozen self-service registers at once, grocery stores tore out existing checkout lanes to install deltas of self-checkout terminals.
Unfortunately, the limitations of the system soon piled up. Because these terminals were retrofitted into existing store design, monitors welcoming the next guest were often obstructed from lines of basket-carriers.
The system is also only as strong as its weakest link. A single incorrectly tagged barcode in a store full of hundreds of thousands of products can cause enormous inefficiencies with an iconic "Unexpected item in the bagging area" error message. As many of the savings intended by eliminating cashiers were ultimately lost to theft and wasted time, chains began ripping the kiosks right back out just a decade after they were installed.
In , Kroger announced that its Microsoft Azure-backed Kroger Edge technology would be rolled out across of its stores. Aisles were outfitted entirely with digital prices, as well as monitors displaying video ads for various products. Smartphone integration is on the horizon, but the idea is that consumers can build their shopping lists beforehand and shelves will light up as they walk down the aisles, making grocery shopping more of a sprint than a marathon.
You could even set dietary restriction profiles online, and allow the store to build meal plan carts for vegans or those with food allergies, just by walking up and down the rows. The technology is fittingly called Just Walk Out , and with it, Amazon has completely eliminated checkout lines and the necessity of human cashiers to staff them.
You simply grab your groceries and then walk out.
0コメント