Greengrocer

A greengrocer or fruiterer is a retail

Retail

Retail consists of the sale of physical goods or merchandise from a fixed location, such as a department store, boutique or kiosk, or by mail, in small or individual lots for direct consumption by the purchaser. Retailing may include subordinated services, such as delivery. Purchasers may be...

 trader in fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

 and vegetable

Vegetable

The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant....

s; that is, in green grocer

Grocer

A grocer is a bulk seller of food. Beginning as early as the 14th century, a grocer was a dealer in comestible dry goods such as spices, pepper, sugar, and cocoa, tea and coffee...

ies. Greengrocer is primarily a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and Australian term, and greengrocers' shops were once common in suburbs, towns and villages. They have been affected by the dominant rise of supermarkets, but many can be found managing small shops or stores in towns and cities and in some villages. Greengrocers can also be found in street markets and malls, or managing produce departments at supermarkets. Such traders typically handle the entire business of buying, selling, and book-keeping themselves.

The greengrocers' apostrophe

Because of its frequent misuse on greengrocers' signs, such as for apple's, orange's or banana's, an apostrophe used incorrectly to form a plural

English plural

In the English language, nouns are inflected for grammatical number —that is, singular or plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals are formed for nouns...

 is known as a greengrocers' apostrophe.