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I know Grammarly is not a precise source for finding grammar-related mistakes. But its verdict on the following sentence perplexes me:

It's necessary for offering pleasant shopping experience to your customers.

Grammarly says that I should write 'a pleasant shopping experience'. My cognition says that experience is a mass noun and therefore, does not require any article prior to it.

Even Google Ngram did not help me much.

What should I write here-pleasant shopping experience or a pleasant shopping experience?

Rucheer M
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Interesting question.

Both are grammatical.

Like many abstracts, "experience" is usually uncountable, but has a particular meaning when countable.

Uncountable, it refers to the sum of what a person has experienced up to that point, and is often used quantitively. So "your shopping experience" in that sense is the sum of all the times you have shopped and what you experienced then. Probably that would not get used quantitively, but "your cooking experience" for example, is most likely to be used in talking about how much you have cooked, and by implication, how competent you are.

The countable sense, on the other hand, refers to a particular occasion on which you are experiencing the thing. Since they are thinking about how to make you want to come back to their shop, they are focussing on making your (countable, singular) shopping experience pleasurable.

More cynically, one could say that this isn't English, it's marketing-speak, which is full of phrases like "a(n) XXX experience".

Colin Fine
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You should write "a pleasant shopping experience". Or, you could write ""pleasant shopping experiences".

In this case "experience" is countable, not a mass noun. You can have one, two or many shopping experiences.

The difference is between having an experience, or gaining experience.

BigJ Pdog
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