SLAP HAPPY LARRY

The word shop originally meant a shed or booth for work and trade, like a workshop. Around the mid-1300s shop also became used to refer to a place for the sale of merchandise. The first use of the verb ‘to shop’ actually meant bringing something to a shop to sell. The sense of coming to a shop to look at and purchase things is from almost a century later, in the 1760s.

Superlinguo

A CONVENIENCE STORE

A convenience store is a world of sound. From the tinkle of the door chime tot he voices of TV celebrities advertising new products over the in-store cable nework, to the calls of the store workers, the beeps of the bar code scanner, the rustle of customers picking up items and placing them in baskets, and the clacking of heels walking around the store. It all blends into the convenience store sound that ceaselessly caresses my eardrums.

Convenience Store Woman, opening paragraph, by Sayaka Murata

A P*RN SHOP

Frenchy’s wasn’t exactly inviting – it was lit like a 7-eleven, which made all the plastic seem much more plastic, and the metal seem much more metal, and the naked people on the covers of the dvd cases look even less hot and more like cheap p*rn. passing up go down on moses and afternoon delight in august, i found myself in this bizarre penis produce section.

from Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to the parking lot and drive to the baseball field, where I couldn’t even get out of the car, just sit with my hands on the steering wheel and stare at the Cyclone fence and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

OUTDOOR TRADING