Тематический сборник текстов для чтения (английский язык). Соснина Е.П - 119 стр.

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119
TOPIC 12. MONEY MATTERS, SHOPPING
Text 1. Super market
A supermarket is a store that sells a wide variety of goods including food and alcohol,
medicine, clothes, and other household products that are consumed regularly. It is often part
of a chain that owns or controls (sometimes by franchise) other supermarkets located in the
same or other towns; this increases the opportunities for economies of scale.
Superma rkets usually offer products at low prices by reducing margins . To maintain a
profit supermarkets attempt to make up for the low margins with a high volume of s ales.
Customers usually shop be putting their products into trolleys (shopping carts) or baskets
(self-service) and pay for the products at the check-out. At present, many supermarket
chains are trying to reduce labour costs (and thus margins) further by shifting to self-service
check-out machines, where a group of four or five machines is supervised by a single
assistant.
A larger full-service supermarket combined with a department store is known as a
hypermarket. Other services that supermarkets may have include cafйs , creches, photo
development, pharmacies, and/or petrol stations.
Early retailers did not trust their customers. In many stores, all products had to be
fetched by an assistant from high shelves on one side of a counter while the customer stood
on the other side and pointed to what they wanted. This was obviously labour-intensive and
quite expensive.
The concept of a self-service grocery store was developed by Clarence Saunders and
his Piggly Wiggly stores, and A&P was the most successful of the early chains, having
become common in American cities in the 1920s . The general trend in retail since then has
been to stack shelves at night and let the customer get their own goods and bring them to the
front of the store to pay for them. Although there is a higher risk of shoplifting, the costs of
appropriate security measures will be ideally outweighed by the economies of scale and
reduced labour costs.
The first true supermarket was opened by ex-Kroger employee Michael J. Cullen, in
1930 in a 6,000 s quare foot (560 mІ) former garage in Jamaica, Queens, New York. The
store, titled King Kullen, following King Kong, operated under the slogan "Pile it high. Sell
it low." When Cullen died in 1936, there were fifteen stores in operation.

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