In the middle of every British town there's a road called the High Street. It usually has a pub, a Post Office and several shops in it; and the women of the town like to go there because they can stand outside the shops and talk, and show each other their dogs and babies.
Once, every High Street had a shop called the general stores: it sold milk, soap,vegetables, sausages and food in tins. But now most of the general stores have closed because supermarkets have opened. Supermarkets are shops where you take the food off the shelves yourself and pay for it when you leave. The British don't like them much: they always have unhappy faces when they're doing their shopping in a supermarket.
Most High Street have a tobacconist's - a narrow, little shop where you can buy cigarettes, pipes and everything that a smoker needs. But sometimes the Post Office is also a tobacconist's and paper shop. They're very careful in these Post Offices - you must buy stamps on one side of the shop, and newspapers on the other side!
Every large town has got a branch of Woolworth's and a branch of Marks and Spencer's. Woolworth's is a shop that sells everything very cheaply; Marks and Spencer's sells good clothes. Clothes in Britain are cheap: the Englishman likes to be able to buy a lot of them. He spends most of his money on clothes and on his house, and he tries not to spend too much on food or on his holidays.
In London, there are several very large shops that sell everything from football boots to televisions; they're called 'department stores'. A lot of them are in Oxford Street. The most famous department store is Harrods. Rich people from everywhere in the world go there to buy the best jewels, the best clothes and the best furniture.
English shop assistants are usually very polite. They call the customer "sir" or "madam", and give them a lot of time to look at the things in the shop before they ask: "Can I help you?" The only ones who try to sell things quickly are those who work in the boutiques - the small shops that sell clothes for young people. Be careful with them, or you'll come out of the shop with something that you don't want!
The most interesting shops are the the antique shops. Sometimes, you can find very good paintings or pieces of furniture that the shops are selling very cheaply. But they also have a lot of ugly old things that nobody wants. The people who run these shops are often stranger then the things in them. There's an old lady in London who doesn't sell anything to a customer if she doesn't like him!