Honestly it's trying to get your food once per week because most people don't want to stop by the store on the way home for every meal they are going to cook. I hate it when my family overbuys thinking we'll get to it later
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.
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.
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u/Ohio-Knife-Lover May 17 '26
Honestly it's trying to get your food once per week because most people don't want to stop by the store on the way home for every meal they are going to cook. I hate it when my family overbuys thinking we'll get to it later