For most visitors, Nanjing Road Pedestrian Street is worth walking through if you are already nearby, but not worth a special trip. It is the vehicle-free middle section of Nanjing East Road, lined with department stores, chain brands, time-honoured names, snack counters and souvenir stalls, with the history surviving only in a few old department store facades and most of the goods available in other cities too. Its most solid use is as a free walking route between People's Square and the Bund; for serious shopping the Jing'an Temple stretch of Nanjing Road West is better, and anyone who dislikes crowds or expects old Shanghai can skip it.

What is actually worth carrying home from Shanghai is food and tea that travels, everyday household goods with a real use, stationery and textiles, rather than the airport fridge magnets and keyrings. Locals buy these in department-store food halls, time-honoured food shops, supermarket chains, wholesale and market districts and museum shops, where prices are marked and haggling is neither needed nor expected. Tea and silk are the two categories most often bought badly, so buy them by grade and fibre content, and check your own country's customs rules before carrying food or tea across a border.

The answer depends on how the price appears. Chain shops, department stores, convenience stores, supermarkets, most restaurants and anything carrying a barcode are fixed-price, and asking for a discount only puts the staff in an awkward position; in markets and individual stalls, antique and curio shops and tourist-market stalls, where a person quotes the price, there is usually room to counter, and countering is how that kind of transaction is done. The common mistake is bargaining where it is not done and paying the first quote where it is, so judge by the form of the price rather than by how the shop looks.

A Shanghai supermarket is worth one deliberate visit: restaurants here are not cheap, and the supermarket is the most direct way to eat breakfast and lunch well and cheaply, as well as the fastest way to see what people actually eat. The most useful kind for a visitor is the food hall in a department store basement, where prepared food, a bakery, fruit and imported goods share one floor, office workers buy their lunch, and no Chinese is needed. Prices are on the shelf rather than at the till, produce is weighed and labelled by the customer, and payment is by phone.