Most of the shops in the kind of area where I live are little more than shacks at the side of the road. On the other hand, in the city centre, there are modern shopping malls which would make much of London look out-moded.
Apart from the shopping malls, many of the shops have a screen made of heavy plastic strips across the door. They do not have window displays as they would at home and since I can't read many of the signs, I usually have to go inside to see what they are selling. Inside there are usually a lot of shop assistants. It's quite common for goods to be in cabinets so you have to ask to see the thing that you want. Once you have made your choice, you are given an invoice which you take to the cashier and pay. You are then given a receipt which you take back to the shop assistant to collect your purchase. This is very similar to the system which operated in Hungary. There it was a legacy of the communist system - communism aimed to provide full employment so many tasks were very labour-intensive. It may be the same here.
When you pay for goods here, there is always a little exchange, which could be roughly translated as,
"I'm giving you 10 yuan."
"I'm giving you 3 yuan in change."
I mentioned before that it feels very safe here and I have seen little evidence of crime. However, you wouldn't believe this if you visited a supermarket. Before entering the area where the goods are, you have to hand in all your bags at the cloakroom. In one of the supermarkets I visited all the display jars of coffee were tied together to prevent theft, and if you wanted to purchase one, you had to ask an assistant to fetch it for you.
Supermarkets are fascinating because of the variety of goods which are available. As in the restaurants, it is common for there to be tanks of live fish and shellfish from which you make your selection. There are lots of fruit and vegetables which I don't recognise - a particularly beautiful one is a root vegetable called xīnlĭmĕi (=beautiful inner heart), slightly smaller than a swede, which is mid green on the outside but the flesh inside is pink and white. Supermarkets also serve the type of hot snacks which are commonly eaten for lunch - no racks of sandwiches here!
Almost all the currency here, down to the smallest denomiations, are paper notes. (They invented paper, after all!) One consequence of this is that there are no coin-operated slot machines.