I have never used bitcoin as a means of direct payment. because my profession or job makes me paid with ordinary money.
https://alastairroberts45.contently.com/But I am interested and like your suggestion or your story about asking the shop owner directly about whether or not you can pay using bitcoin. Because I also think that there are actually a lot of shop owners who are familiar with crypto or bitcoin in particular. But certain situations keep them from making the bulletin board accept crypto/bitcoin payments. Maybe I'll also try asking the shop owner if he knows crypto and accepts crypto as payment.
If you have Bitcoin you will use it as direct contact of exchange of what you want for the particular time, except in your region bitcoin is not permitted to use as exchange of goods and services, right now people is contradictory bitcoin using to buy items and digital currencies, and this suppose to introduce and make openly for some people to know the difference. we have varieties of digital currency and which bitcoin is one among them and PayPal is another one, if you uses PayPal for buying things is same digital currency
Bitcoin is hard to spend in day to day but I like to keep it as a SoV. Maybe if LN gets full adoption this will get better but who knows!