En ville

Of all the ways a visitor gives offence in France, this is the one they manage most often and understand least. Walking into a shop without saying bonjour is not a small omission. It is read as rudeness, and the service you get afterwards will reflect it.

What is expected

You enter a bakery, a pharmacy, a small shop, a waiting room. Before anything else, before you even look at the shelves:

• Bonjour madame or Bonjour monsieur
• Bonjour messieurs-dames if there are several people

Then you do your shopping. On the way out, au revoir, merci, bonne journée, any of them.

Why it lands so hard

An English speaker treats a shop as a place where a transaction happens, and the greeting as optional lubrication. A French speaker treats it as somebody's space that you are entering, and the greeting as the acknowledgement that a person is standing in it.

Skipping it does not read as brisk. It reads as though you have decided the person behind the counter is a vending machine. That is why the reaction can seem out of proportion: you have not been curt, you have been dismissive, and those are different things.

The one everyone forgets

Waiting rooms. You walk into a doctor's surgery with six strangers in it and you greet all of them, generally, to the room. It feels absurd the first time and completely normal by the third.

Lifts in apartment buildings work the same way, and so, still, does the stairwell.

Madame, not mademoiselle

Use madame for any adult woman. Mademoiselle was removed from French administrative forms in 2012 and now sounds either quaint or faintly patronising depending on who receives it. There is no situation where a learner needs it.

Then ask for what you want

Je voudrais is the phrase that will carry you through almost every counter in the country: je voudrais une baguette, s'il vous plaît.

Je veux is what a child says. Donnez-moi is an order. Je voudrais is what an adult says, and the conditional is doing all the politeness for you.