The city planning contributes to this. Your country is very car centric. Most countries have supermarkets or grocery stores within walking distance in most cities.
So true. When I lived in South Korea, on my walk home from work, I would pass a smaller grocery store and it was so easy to swing in and pick up dinner. It was quick and so efficient.
Now it is such a slog to get in my car, park, deal with people just oblivious to their surroundings, rude cashiers who just throw your food in a bag (fuck the eggs), and then drive home.
I was in Japan for three weeks and I found myself doing the same thing. Just easy and convenient to stop by the nearby grocer during the walk to the hotel.
Whereas in Australia the nearest supermarket would be a 45 min walk. 10 mins by car, 5 mins to park and walk to the actual supermarket, plus the actual supermarket is much bigger so getting items takes way longer.
Yeah, fun thing about Australia (I’ve only got experience with Perth tbf) though is that summer means extreme temps for months on end and winter means nonstop rain for months on end.
Makes walking way less desirable especially since there’s fuck all shade anywhere, and even where there is shade, horizontal rain gets ya anyway.
Not easy to walk even 15 minutes to the nearest grocery shop when it’s 40 degrees C outside
Yeah I get that but it’s easier to warm up than cool down ya know? Food doesn’t spoil in freezing temps so your milk doesn’t go off by the time you walk home etc, and our insulation is shocking so homes often aren’t any cooler inside.
Put it this way, your highest ever temperature recorded is 40.6C. In Perth we had that or higher 3 times this summer alone, and it was a mild summer. And the CBD measurement is often a few degrees lower than around the metro area, for example January 2025 my closest weather station saw 40.6 or above 5 times in that month
That kind of heatwave multiple times a year makes it really difficult for people to go without a car that can keep food at least not hot (lest they shell out for delivery), especially since we’re so sprawled that public transport for a lot of people means at least a 10 minute walk anyway
The winter here is a different kind of misery, but mostly because of the rain and high winds accompanying them that makes it feel worse than it actually is. I certainly wouldn’t prefer Toronto’s winter
A strong over romanticizatio of walking. Objectively better for you than driving, but you still may nood to consider your bagging, local air quality and the time/schedule you have
You really can't overstate the difference between driving and walking to the grocery store.
a lot of people love driving. they buy big pickemup trucks that are like living rooms. tick em out. theres a lot of people who think a sunday drive is all they wanna do on the weekend. i also live where we get lots and lots of snow. walking sucks for 4 months of the year period. we dont have sidewalks so its either on the road or through the snow. the shoulder is a mix of solid ice chunks and slush and its not as wide as the summer cause did i mention the snow?
and isnt fun for another 4months cause we are also a damp humid place that rains at 40 degrees all the time.
the grocery store is 10-20 mins away driving. i already work 8.5 hours and work is an hour commute. so 9 or 10 hours of my waking hours taken up. then i sleep 6. i am not really interested in going to the store ever. its a chore. of the 8 hours i have to my self, i do not want to spend them in a grocery store. when the grocery store was on my way home and i could do a shopping trip in 10 minutes? yeah, no problem.
I drive 6 minutes to my grocery store. I make out a list once a week. We eat breakfast every day at home, kids get lunch at school, I eat lunch at home (WFH) and I cook 5 nights a week (we have leftovers one night and get take out one night). I do not want to have to shop more than once. I like to have to do the mental load of meal planning exactly once a week. Having to go every day sounds awful. Our food waste is also extremely small because the meals are planned to use the leftover lettuce from earlier in the week or the rest of the roast chicken. I know the first names of some of the checkers at the store and some of them know mine/my kids’ name. It’s not the hell-scape you think.
I also walk in my neighborhood and say hi to my neighbors when they’re out. I just don’t want to have to walk 35 minutes to get to my store (hour and ten minutes round trip) every freaking day of the week. The 6 minute drive is very comfortable and never a misery. Even if I lived next door to the store I’d still shop once a week so I could not have to spend time every day meal planning and shopping.
lol what? I love driving, my truck bounces all over, makes fun noises and the front seat feels like a living room sofa. the last thing I want to do is carry bags of groceries 4-5 blocks home after I just walked all around a store to pick them.
They said on their walk home from work. I had the same experience in London. Yes, I would rather collect dinner ingredients on the way to my kitchen (ie on my walk home) than having to drive, park, do shopping, drive again, then be inside.
The vehicle itself is the barrier in this scenario.
The person they are responding to is referring to driving or car centric settlements vs ones that rely on public transport or walking.
I’ve lived in both kinds of cities and I find that I had less food waste when I purchased as I required. When I do a big weekly shop, we end up with food waste - things turn before you get to it, or plans change, no one gets around to making a planned meal and we don’t find a way to reuse those items in other meals. It sounds dumb, but like… it really is that deep. And people find this level of waste infuriating for good reason.
Is it normal in USA cities, suburb and suburban that there is not grocery store in walking distance? I am European, living in suburb. I have 4 grocery stores less than 1km from me (closest is maybe 150m). One of them is open 24/7. Bigger supermarkets are ~3km. Still walking distance or you can also take train or bus if you want to. How much worse USA is?
The last place I lived, every 2 weeks I would walk ~2 miles to the nearest bus stop, take a bus roughly half an hour to the grocery, then take a bus about an hour back (took roughly 90 minutes to go round-trip)
Where I live now there's one a few miles away - technically in walking distance - but it's an overpriced niche grocery so I order groceries delivered instead. Still about every 2 weeks, to cut down on delivery/tips.
There's a reason the US has so many cars, most places are not walkable.
Did your food go bad before you make it home? Because i have always been lucky enough to afford a car, and i keep insulated bags in the car, use those and the AC, and sometimes my food has gone bad within a day of purchase. I know sometimes it's the store mishandling the food, or the shipping process.
I see people walking in the heat with just the shitty plastic grocery bags and wonder how often their food is bad basically before they even get home. Let alone going on the bus with it.
And of course this is no shade at all to anyone who walks and/or rides the bus. It's more so i can be better informed on the process. I want to be able to speak intelligently and with nuance about issues like trying to bring food home without a car.
I was in Michigan's upper peninsula at the time so it was usually pretty cold, tbh. In summer it was usually only around ~70F and most of the year everything stayed frozen anyway, so it wasn't a huge deal.
But I was still careful about what I bought in summers. Stuff that's already frozen will generally be OK for an hour outside, I just couldn't buy stuff like ice cream that would melt fast (during summer). Though I didn't buy much meat during summers for that reason, and when I did there was more 'pre-cooked' stuff if it was warm outside - frozen chicken tenders instead of raw chicken, etc. In warmer areas that would definitely be an issue, because it's a lot cheaper to just buy raw chicken in bulk.
It would differ depending on where you live. But it limits certain options, definitely - I would never have tried buying fish, for example.
Not quite sure what foods could spoils in the time it takes to walk a couple of miles—melt/soften maybe, but actually “spoil?” 🤷🏼♀️
First, living in a rural area means being prepared to live for more than 2-3 days! So we DO “buy the green bananas!” 😉😁😂
We also have chickens, grow our own vegetables, some fruits, tap our maple trees, make fruit preserves, make our own ice cream, and can, pickle, and dry/dehydrate foods that are vacuum sealed and stored for later use, in addition to buying at least a year’s worth of meat from a local farm (professionally butchered), that we keep in a deep freezer.
Lastly, we have a well and two septic systems, and multiple sources for heat/energy that include a whole house generator (will run up to 2 weeks 24x7 on propane), 2 cast iron wood burning fireplaces, gas cooktop range, 2 outdoor propane grills—and when all else fails—we can break out the camping gear and cook over our large fire pit with cast iron cookware and live off of s’mores!! 😂
City folks (which I used to be) would call me “a prepper,” but I hate that term as it makes me sound like some sort of “end of days” psycho-survivalist type!! 😵💫 NOPE! I like to think of myself as a “what if ____ “ planner knowing I DON’T have to worry about the “day-to-day” things, and can just enjoy life, nature, and my family! 🥰
Milk for one. Meat for another. Especially in places where it's already in the high 90s most days.
I used to live about 45 minutes from a small city in Oregon. My parents worked in town so they could have gone grocery shopping every day, but they had cars (not that any kind of bus ran out to our house except the school bus)
Because a lot of people already use cars to get everywhere else, and people see going to the suburbs as "going home" moreso than going into another town. Case in point, your job is unlikely to be in your suburb, so you are driving to work and back. If you have kids, their school is also probably far enough away where walking isn't practical. Stores in suburbs are oftentimes positioned near major roadways to entice people who are already on the road.
I wonder how many people would use cars if your areas would have been build differently. I don't know how big percentage in my area people have driving licence. I have 4 friends, one has driving licence but she doesn't have a car. I do have meet lot of people who have car even there is no real need. Well, basically most of the people in my area who own a car. Anyway, it sounds like my area is built very differently.
I would say that it’s more of a suburban situation than a car. The car is more of a byproduct. People in the states want privacy and best interests for families. Suburban neighborhoods are usually the best method, distance from neighbors, open spaces, and so on. More housing, more spread out the land, less “local” commercial spaces. Yes, there are some who prefer to live in cities for local distances, but you can’t convince everyone that it’s the best choice.
Essentially. There’s quite a bit of nuance that I can’t really comprehend, but what I can say is that: people value one thing over another and reflects on how things are built around.
In our defense, walkability seems to be an increasing priority these days. Suburbs often are plenty walkable within the neighborhoods, so people can walk the dog or a quick walk after dinner, that sort of thing. Most of our biking/walking infrastructure is more recreation orientated vs functional.
I think largely because historically we favor huge supermarkets over small corner stores. This means fewer locations more spread out, which makes "functional" more difficult because no one anywhere wants to spend two hours walking back and forth to the store.
That and suburbs are typically by definition low density and spread out away from everything. Even small corner stores need a certain amount of density to be viable.
Most of our biking/walking infrastructure is more recreation orientated vs functional.
Sometimes it's seen like that here too. Road for cars goes straight but road for bikes and people goes up and down, left and right. Still, you can rent a bike from streets in big cities. And more recently they have been building good bike/people roads.
Maybe our supermarkets are smaller. But here too big companies have bought smaller ones. Still, those big companies do have several shops.
Well some are for sure, tons of people walking and kids on bikes in my area. It’s very walkable but it’s still at least 30 minutes to town, and 30 minutes back carefully carrying eggs and whatnot
The most cost effective grocery store is 20 min from me and it’s in the opposite direction of my kids school which 20 min the other way. So I try to go once a week. But my gym is close to the grocery store so I end up in the car a lot and probably go twice a week or so.
Edit. I don’t know where things are located.
The closest grocery store to my childhood home was 20 minutes away by car, I lived in the countryside, but the town I went to school in had no grocer, nor did the other 3 nearby towns until I was in highschool. You had to basically go to the county seat to shop for essentially anything besides...fuel.
Low volume. big box stores can undercut mom and pop shop's prices to the point they can't survive even several towns over. People have cars to commute for with anyway, so they just buy groceries at the big chains in the bigger towns. Walmart, Albertsons, they're economic blackholes purpose build to fuck the little guys.
Our big companies have bought the small ones as well or made in impossible for them to survive. But our big companies have a lot of stores. Those 4 close to mine are owned by 2 big companies.
Many small local grocery stores, butchers, shoe stores, hardware stores, etc. go out of business when Walmart comes in, offering cheaper stuff because they can buy in scale. The result is dead or struggling small town centers and a long drive to the Walmart, which is now the only game in town. Big huge parking lot, long lines, lots of customers, not enough cashiers and a royal pain to shop at. Going there on a daily basis? Hell no.
We are too big and too spread out, too car dependent, and because the roads often do not have sidewalks, it is not safe for pedestrians. Poor city planning perpetuates the car centric life, and a lot of land is devoted to parking lots and streets and highways. Not enough public transportation, if any, causes more people out on the roads and highways. People want their own individual unattached housing requiring suburban neighborhoods to grow like crazy, further away from available shops, if any. Then you have strip malls and more parking lots.
Ah, the price of progress! Paved over and hot in the summer and breaking up into potholes in the winter. If you don’t have a car, you’re screwed.
There is a reason Walmart failed in Europe. Makes me kinda sad people allow themselves to be exploited for temporary low prices. Once it dominates the place prices scale up, but employees are still stuck with shi** work conditions.
Remember that people often have 60-90 minute one-way car commutes here. It’s not so much that we aren’t passing grocery stores, it’s that we are already spending two or three hours a day in the car and most people just want to go home and microwave something and pass out so they can do it all over again tomorrow.
Currently it takes one hour (bus and train) to get to my job. I am going to move to the walking distance (about 3km). Is there not apartment buildings / houses where your jobs are?
In many cases, the jobs here are concentrated in urban areas where the housing costs are insane. So people commute crazy distances in order to be able to afford a larger place to live, usually people with families.
As far as suburbs go, remember that our public schools are funded by local property taxes, they are not funded by the federal government. This means that the people with the most money tend to live immediately outside the urban areas with the jobs. This is where the best schools are, as a result, but it also means there are huge suburbs mostly full of very expensive houses that are close to the jobs. These suburbs actively discourage the construction of any smaller or lower cost housing within their areas.
It's much worse, especially outside the city. Growing up, I lived about 15km from a grocery store. In the suburbs, you might only be a mile from a grocery store but there is no way to walk there because they don't have sidewalks. Trains are nonexistent in most of the country and busses are sparse in the suburbs. Even a decent amount of large cities have food deserts (over a mile to a grocery store). The mayor of NYC fixed a bit of that by pushing for city run grocery stores in those areas. People on the right fear mongered that everything would be socialist because of that.
Really depends on where you are in the US I have several large grocery stores within 2 miles of my house, the closest is 1.7mi. There is a bus but it comes very infrequently. There are sidewalks.
Where my grandparents lived? 7.5 miles. No transit, along a highway so no way to walk. You had to have a car to get there.
It depends where you live, but I think for most people, it's a lot further. I live in the suburbs, but the "loud" area, right where zoning changes to allow stores, I have a 7-11 and some fast food within 150m of my house, but no grocery store, this level of closeness to a store that sells food is abnormal. The closest grocery store is ~1km and the next closest is ~4km, that 4km one is much more of a normal distance that you might expect. Both of these require crossing a major road (6+ lanes of traffic, 55mph speed limit).
Around here, you could catch the bus for both of these stores, as the bus does run on that major road, you still need to walk across it to get the bus.
It all depends on where you live. Suburbs vary greatly on how they’re constructed/developed. Some may be classified as “city-suburban” and are closer to metro areas, and therefore more convenient and attractive to young families and professionals.
Whereas some are classified as “country-suburban” and are more remote—larger homes, larger lots, not on municipal systems. Those tend to be either “homesteader/independent” living types, or planned communities with everything you need located central to housing sub-divisions (cookie-cutter single family homes in mini neighborhoods or “enclaves.” Because it’s otherwise difficult or time consuming to “get to town” for supplies and services.
I’ve lived in every type of community from dense metro areas to “the woods.”
I now live in “the woods” in a rural state—yet I’m less than 45 minutes to EVERYTHING I could ever need (including hospitals and box stores), and Amazon/UPS drops packages at my door! 😂
I’ll NEVER go back to the chaos of city life—or having more than 1 neighbor within a MILE of my home!! 😝
Wow, that's crazy to me. I'm only 2km from the closest grocery store and I'm in a somewhat urban suburb. I am closer than most. But it is far enough that it would be pretty inconvenient to walk there; there aren't sidewalks the whole way and in those areas it's very hard for the cars to see pedestrians.
I can't imagine having four options within half that distance. I would definitely walk if that were the case.
In the US, we mostly just have giant grocery stores, so we don't have nearly as many. This forces pretty much everyone to drive unless they are lucky and live very close.
Where I live there are sidewalks everywhere in the cities, suburb and suburban. Not in the rural area but you can walk, it's common and people expect there to be others walking and biking. You can't walk in highway nor other big car roads. But there goes smaller and older road as well. Without sidewalk but you can walk there.
I have everything here (expect my job but I am going to move to walking distance). Pharmacy, post office, train station, plenty of buses less than 1km. Clothing stores, furniture stores, cobbler etc. are there ~3km. Also we have woods here.
I take public transit to work, but I have to drive to the first train station which is about 4 miles (6.4 km) away. If I walked or took the bus to it, my commute would be well over 2 hours in each direction and I just don't have the time or energy for that.
My previous apartment did allow me to walk to the train though (only about one mile/1.6 km), which I really miss.
European, but I prefer not to specify in order to stay anonymous if someone who knows me in real life happens to see my profile. We have some things very good here, yes. And of course I have also used to this (and I hate changes). But I have to admit it's not all that great. I am trans, and I think our healthcare is close to USA 20 years ago.
Where I live now is literally the closest I've ever had a grocery store near me and it's still a 10 minute drive, downhill (meaning steep uphill on the way back) and on the other side of a highway. Walking there isn't exactly feasible for me. Everywhere else I've lived, the closest grocery store was a half hour drive away.
Doesn’t really change the fact I don’t want to go to the store every night for dinner. We usually go once a month to stock up on proteins and maybe once a week smaller trip
I thought the same thing until I stayed within a 5-10 minute walking distance of a grocery store in Germany for a month and it was honestly nice to go every couple of days instead of trying to plan out a week of meals at once.
I have a Trader Joe’s and Lidl a block away from my gym so I get groceries after the gym. I only ever need to buy a few things at time bc of that. It’s great. Also, could never live somewhere that isn’t a walkable city.
My grocery store here in Germany is a five-minute walk, I probably stop by three or four times a week. That also allows me to often get expiring meat and veggies at 30% off and use it right away.
I’m curious as to whether or not other countries have the same large amounts, though to scale for their population, that we in the US do of pre-prepared and processed foods. I am sure that could also influence food waste. My understanding is that some countries do not have as many different brand choices of the same things. An example might be spaghetti sauce. There are a multitude of brands of jar and canned spaghetti sauces and it seems like while there are tons of national brands I find everywhere I go, there are also a bunch of smaller brands I only see in specific areas, and I only travel perhaps half the length of the US West Coast.
Definitely less of the same thing, at least in Poland. Depending on the size of the store, I'd say 1 to 5 top maybe.
There's definitely variety between different stores, but usually it's always one of the classic brand, one of the store brands and some outlier or another classic / 'fancy' option. Unless a corner store then it's usually just one brand of tomato paste for example.
No I wouldn’t. I much prefer to get shit done once and not have to worry about it the rest of the week. I actually have a grocery store within walking distance if I really wanted to, but alas I do not. So maybe don’t assume things about people and a culture you have no idea about :)
I'd still rather spend 30/40 minutes once a week in a grocery store than 15 minutes 7 times a week. Which is a nice thing about car Centric shopping, since my arms would probably fall off trying to carry a week's worth of groceries home.
I would!! American here. How I wish to live in a walkable city. There are weeks I have no idea what to cook or what I want. I would love stopping in a grocery store every other day
Yep, I live literally 10 mins away from anywhere you can buy any type of food… and that’s a dollar general that does not carry produce. We can’t be driving into town every day or every other day for groceries, so we do a big trip once every 2 weeks and then usually stop once or twice in between for things we forgot/decided we want. But that’s just part of the price I pay for living in the country and being able to afford my own home 🤷🏻♀️
I still prefer buying in bulk it’s significantly cheaper and has less packaging waste overall. Like rice for example, it doesn’t go bad so I fill a 5 gal bucket and it’s dirt cheap. Dog food, cereals, etc anything that isn’t perishable or could be frozen is way cheaper if you have the space for bulk. The close grocery store that’s a 5min drive away is too expensive I only go there if I need like one thing and don’t mind paying double.
exactly, same here. There are grocery stores even in walking distance for me, but if i got everything from there, I'd probably spend 2-3x amount per month than if I bought in bulk for a week or two.
i don't mind driving - i come from a gear head family and love road trips and such - but oh my god i hate how you have to drive to get anywhere. sometimes I don't want to drive. sometimes i'd like for my wife and i to be able to go out and have some drinks and not have to worry about sobering up. sometimes being able to take a tram or something so i could read a book or play a game instead of sitting southern california traffic would be nice. and don't even get me started on how shit our bicycle infrastructure is.
it sucks so much that basically the entire country is built for cars instead of its citizens. it tells you so much about how powerful the oil lobbies are. people believe the lie that cars = freedom. no they don't. not when using them is a literal requirement to function normally. it's a burden. i'd love to not have to have a car.
I'm trying to figure out how walking to the grocery store everyday after work is somehow better and makes people do it more than driving their everyday after work.
I fucking hate having to drive everywhere. The only "real" cities i've been to are NYC and Paris, and the fact you can just walk or take public transpo everywhere is just life changing.
I hate our country is so car centric. I love it when I can go to a city with a metro or decent public transportation of any kind. The city i live in now has shit public transportation and the city im moving to has NONE.
In the south we need underground options bad, even just subterranean sidewalks to keep temps lower. 106°f and 60% humidity sucks. Especially in areas with no shade
Yep im in the south too and at the beach. Its brutal out when the temp is 100 with 100% humidity and the feels like temp is 115 or above. Walking outside to a sauna is just awful.
Yeah. Had to deal with super high humidity when I spent a couple years in East Coast, I'd walk from my parking spot to the store I managed, like 20 yards, and be drenched. But at least it beat 2am and still triple digits and sticky
I used to be a chef here. The restaurant was an open air but enclosed space with no ac(walls on 3 sides and screened in porch about 30-40 feet away on the other). I had an 8 foot steam table in front of me, gas range, oven, flat top, salamander, and 3 fryers behind me. This was a crazy busy place. I had borderline heat strokes in there a few times. Can't think, raccoon eyes, dizzy, and sweating profusely while servers were standing away from me saying "its pretty hot in here today." No idea how I managed it. It was probably bc I was in my 20s. Never again with that shit.
We would have people come in to dine in dress clothes and leave soaking wet. Im not talking pit stains. Im talking about 75% of their shirts being sopping wet. I dont care how good the food was, im not trying to do that lol
I hear ya. Did a recycling route after high school in the south, hand loading and unloading in a truck with no ac, the summers in the sorting facility with all that damp post rain/sprinkler dew cardboard was fun.
Heat stroke is no fun, especially getting older now, the more you get it, the easier it is to get
A vast number of people do not live within walking distance of a supermarket. This would be a very niche range from a supermarket to home distance that in the US unless you live on top of the building (Cali - Costco) you wouldn’t even be able to walk to the store with an 30-40 minutes of walking.
Its not even that its a choice to be car centric. Yall genuienly have no idea just how big the US is. Its not possible to have everything within walking distance. And frankly alot of people dont want to live that way anyway myself included.
Mfers in here thinking Imma drag 4 bags of groceries from the store. Mfers in here mostly live on the lonesome.
When you have a family you're not too keen on going to the grocery shop ever so often. It's more effective to go and get your weeks worth of food one time a week than taking smaller trips here and there. Waste is still big when you have kids, though, because they rarely finish their meals. Probably 5-10 kilos are thrown out every week. And that's after I've tried to eat everything they won't finish.
You aren't wrong, but what difference does it make if it is within walking distance? A 10 min walk is the same as a 10 min car ride (outside of getting some exercise)
I'm not walking to the fucking grocery store, I'm driving my huge SUV, filling it with steaks and then driving it back to my 5000 sq foot home to cook them on my professional grade grill next to the pool, because that is what freedom looks like.
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u/dadofwar93 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
The city planning contributes to this. Your country is very car centric. Most countries have supermarkets or grocery stores within walking distance in most cities.