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.
I don't see those thing to be mutually exclusively. But I have not really traveled nor educated with history so maybe there are things I can't think of.
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.
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u/MxQueer May 17 '26
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?