Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Parisian convenience stores close at night? Chinese urban convenience stores don't; even here in the American suburbs CVS is open 24 hours, and so is Safeway.
Paris doesn’t have stores comparable to cvs from what I’ve seen. Monoprix is a grocery store but scaled down.
I named them because they're open 24 hours and they seem like the closest fit to a convenience store. CVS is a "drug store", selling products in three basic categories: (1) grooming supplies (hairbrushes / fingernail clippers / makeup... this kind of thing); (2) a very stripped-down grocery inventory, including only prepackaged food (cereal / milk / poptarts / cookies / candy, but no fruit or meat); (3) health products ("nutritional supplements" / vitamins / aspirin / tums / cough drops / etc.).
A Family Mart in Shanghai is much smaller and offers different staples: food (including fruit, but largely prepackaged stuff), electronics cables, the machine that lets you pay your mobile phone bill (it's possible I'm out of date here). It's mostly food. Very much unlike CVS, they also offer a space in the store where you can sit and eat what you just bought, and if you bought instant noodles they'll give you boiling water for them.
There are American stores closer to that model, like 7-11, but I don't know that they stay open 24 hours. 7-11 is historically named after its operating hours. But I don't really see why that's important; if the mostly-prepackaged-food store is closed, but the prepackaged-food-and-also-cosmetics-and-pills store is open, you can meet your prepackaged food needs there.
