Ad-speak is like headlinese. For the sake of pithiness the writers often write sentence fragments, omitting subjects, articles and forms of the verb “to be.”
When a big chain like Walmart says “in store now” in an ad, they really mean “It’s in our stores now.” To keep it short they leave out the “It’s” and the “our,” but they don’t want to say, “in stores now” because that would suggest it was in other companies’ stores as well as theirs. They don’t want to say, “in the store now” because it uses one more word, and because they are talking about more than one store. So they say, “in store now,” and the reader is presumed to understand that it means the item in question is in all Walmart stores.
BTW, you do see “in stores now” in product ads. “Get your bloviator today! In stores now!”
Note, FWIW, that even as we have been writing this thread, OP has another current thread in which he investigates the vagaries of Unix shell scripting! The potential for cross-confusion is omni-present! :eek:
Ah, but this explains a lot! Because we Merkins say “the” in all those places clearly shows that we are not nearly as evolved as our podners across the Pond who, after all, have been evolving for a lot longer!
How about we all just agree to drop the article completely whenever we are going to a well-known type of place where typically only one type of activity is done there or one type of service is rendered.
Tomorrow I’ll be at store buying groceries for the family.
My brother went to library to check out a book about grammar.
On the weekend we’ll go to beach and soak up some rays.
Yeah, in my American dialect, your sentence is fine (although mine would more likely say “he went to the store,”) even without previous context. I find it surprising that some dialects consider the usage unacceptable without establishing what store someone went to, but that’s what makes dialects and language so interesting.
This is why non-native speakers always have problems with articles in English (or is it “with the articles”?), especially those that come from languages that have no articles.
Took me a couple of years before I started using “correct” (that is, widely accepted usage) definite and indefinite articles in English, and it was basically by intuition, with a few “established” rules.
In my usage, there is a difference between going to “the store” or “the mall” and going to “a store” or " a mall."
If I use “the,” I would be referring to a routine shopping trip. It would not necessarily be my regular store or mall. The point, however, would be that the particular store or mall is not important to the context of the story.
If, however, I said “a store” or "a mall,"the particular mall or store would be relevant to the story, though I’m not saying or don’t know the name of the store or mall.
For instance, “I went to the mall to buy shoes” means I went to any mall; the specific mall is not important. However, “I went to a mall in San Antonio that was right across the street from The Alamo” only refers to a particular mall, despite the use of the indefinite article.
I’ve read that the verb “to be” - which is the oldest and most basic verb in any vocabulary - is irregular in every language. Every language is built from usage. Usage is not logical. Q.E.D.
There are longer arguments. Pretty much every book on linguistics is a longer argument about how some aspects of language are logical and the rest are anything but.
I’m glad you asked this – it’s something I’ve long wondered about.
How about that class of nouns for which we never use markings? Or at least, using a marking changes the meaning of the noun:
Joan is at work.
We’d never say that Joan was at the work. But we may specify the type of place where Joan works: Joan is at the office, Joan is at the shop, Joan is at the factory, Joan is at the school. In none of those sentences would we drop the article or replace it with the nondefinite article. If we say Joan is at an office, it is implied and understood to mean that Joan is not at work. Or at least mostly – if Joan’s work takes her to other people’s offices, we’re more likely to say that Joan is at a customer’s office than simply at an office.
John is at home
means something very different from
John is at the home.
I’d say that the first use means that John is located where he lives, whereas the second means he’s at an institution (such as a nursing home) where he doesn’t live.
