There’s no reason you should need to drive for that kind of stuff. Sure, it takes 5 minutes, but it’s worse for your health, the environment, your wallet, and your morale.
I never said you should. Only that the above in no way describes the majority experience. It’s really not that stressful in the least bit. It’s a 10 minute experience with an extra wide parking spot for your f150 at one of the dozens of choices you’ll have to grab your eggs.
I am particularly lucky in that I could go to Wegmans or one of several farms within that 10 minute time frame.
It’s far closer to my hometown experience than what you describe.
I know of 2 grocery stores there (the other half of that town is a mystery to me, probably a couple more there but it was 10 minutes just to get over the bridge, 40+ minutes in the summer, so I never went there), and they got their first supermarket in a decade about 5 years ago now, after the previous one closed 10 years before. For a town of 30,000.
Granted, it’s a summer vacation town, so it’s like 60% rich people’s summer homes, but everybody I’ve talked to who’s lived in a summer town has described more or less the same experiences that I had growing up.
When I lived there, it was a 5-7 minute drive to the closest grocery, where you could pay tourist prices, or 20 minutes to that new supermarket. Your other option was to drive to the next town over or 30 minutes by highway in the other direction.
I visited the US once for a week. Visited Walmart exactly once, and Wegmans every other time. Wegmans blows even my European expectations for a grocery store out of the water.
They are pricy but my wife is celiac and they take their allergen labeling very seriously and importantly consistently. It’s so easy to find GF on the labels for canned goods and such.
Sure, and a suburbanite could bike 10-15 minutes there instead of driving. This isn’t really a problem with suburbs. Grocery stores are incredibly common there, probably moreso than urban areas.
Unless you live in the US with its Euclidean Zoning laws which prohibit mixing land use types in a lot of the country. Groceries are commercial use, and so have to go in commercial developments. Plus the big box stores have killed off most of the small grocers, so you have to go to the strip mall on the edge of town.
This. Have no clue where these people are living, probably in proximity to a larger city, but everywhere I’ve ever lived (mostly smalltown shitsville suburban america), your options are maybe a corner store that has your bare essentials, at an insane markup (mostly, I suspect, in order to exploit people who don’t own a car, forgot something on their way to the grocery, whatever. Capitalize on proximity.), or like, a 20 minute drive to the grocery store. 20 minutes both ways, plus the time you spend in the store, and parking, and traffic. That’s probably like an hour out of your day, at the least. Probably more, since you’re usually getting all your week’s worth of groceries at once, since you wanna minmax your time.
Being in a commercial district and not an industrial one, and, being as most people drive their cars everywhere, and everything tends to be spread out to meet parking minimums, you probably don’t end up close enough to the grocery store to pick up stuff on your way back from most of the other things you’re gonna be doing. It all leads to more dedicated trips where you want to plan out more thoroughly what you’re buying and what you’re eating through the whole week, there’s not a lot of spontaneity there. Even plan out what you’re doing for fun, which I think is kind of antithetical to the idea of having fun.
I have never lived in a place where all of this wasn’t the case.
There’s no reason you should need to drive for that kind of stuff. Sure, it takes 5 minutes, but it’s worse for your health, the environment, your wallet, and your morale.
I never said you should. Only that the above in no way describes the majority experience. It’s really not that stressful in the least bit. It’s a 10 minute experience with an extra wide parking spot for your f150 at one of the dozens of choices you’ll have to grab your eggs.
I am particularly lucky in that I could go to Wegmans or one of several farms within that 10 minute time frame.
It’s far closer to my hometown experience than what you describe.
I know of 2 grocery stores there (the other half of that town is a mystery to me, probably a couple more there but it was 10 minutes just to get over the bridge, 40+ minutes in the summer, so I never went there), and they got their first supermarket in a decade about 5 years ago now, after the previous one closed 10 years before. For a town of 30,000.
Granted, it’s a summer vacation town, so it’s like 60% rich people’s summer homes, but everybody I’ve talked to who’s lived in a summer town has described more or less the same experiences that I had growing up.
When I lived there, it was a 5-7 minute drive to the closest grocery, where you could pay tourist prices, or 20 minutes to that new supermarket. Your other option was to drive to the next town over or 30 minutes by highway in the other direction.
Caught the Upstate NY-er
No banana.
Edit: just realized none of you know that Wegmans goes into VA, NJ, NY, and PA.
And MA
I visited the US once for a week. Visited Walmart exactly once, and Wegmans every other time. Wegmans blows even my European expectations for a grocery store out of the water.
They are pricy but my wife is celiac and they take their allergen labeling very seriously and importantly consistently. It’s so easy to find GF on the labels for canned goods and such.
Sure, and a suburbanite could bike 10-15 minutes there instead of driving. This isn’t really a problem with suburbs. Grocery stores are incredibly common there, probably moreso than urban areas.
Unless you live in the US with its Euclidean Zoning laws which prohibit mixing land use types in a lot of the country. Groceries are commercial use, and so have to go in commercial developments. Plus the big box stores have killed off most of the small grocers, so you have to go to the strip mall on the edge of town.
This. Have no clue where these people are living, probably in proximity to a larger city, but everywhere I’ve ever lived (mostly smalltown shitsville suburban america), your options are maybe a corner store that has your bare essentials, at an insane markup (mostly, I suspect, in order to exploit people who don’t own a car, forgot something on their way to the grocery, whatever. Capitalize on proximity.), or like, a 20 minute drive to the grocery store. 20 minutes both ways, plus the time you spend in the store, and parking, and traffic. That’s probably like an hour out of your day, at the least. Probably more, since you’re usually getting all your week’s worth of groceries at once, since you wanna minmax your time.
Being in a commercial district and not an industrial one, and, being as most people drive their cars everywhere, and everything tends to be spread out to meet parking minimums, you probably don’t end up close enough to the grocery store to pick up stuff on your way back from most of the other things you’re gonna be doing. It all leads to more dedicated trips where you want to plan out more thoroughly what you’re buying and what you’re eating through the whole week, there’s not a lot of spontaneity there. Even plan out what you’re doing for fun, which I think is kind of antithetical to the idea of having fun.
I have never lived in a place where all of this wasn’t the case.
Yeah, turns out people keep needing food every day, so it makes a lot of sense to have places selling it close to where they live.
And every gas station has eggs now.