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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food).

There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?

I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.

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That's me! Our closest supermarket is 10-15 minutes away. I have:

  - Carried the bags
  - Used a backpack
  - Used a push-cart (can carry groceries for 5 people for a week)
  - Biked (with panniers)
  - Biked (with a trailer -- can carry groceries for 10 people for a week)
  - Jogged, when I just needed something small on short notice for a cooking project!

It's totally fine, because our neighborhood is very walkable.

A grocery cart is the classical solution, e.g.:

https://www.amazon.com/Whitmor-6318-2678-Deluxe-Rolling-Util...

They do make bigger ones, but much bigger and you're better off with a second person.

> Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.

Another perspective, a ten minute walk a few times a week is much better for quality of health (therefore life) than taking a car everywhere.

I think that depends on what your trip from home to the store is. Is it a pleasant 10 minute trip on down a country road or in an exciting, bustling city, or is it a 10 minute trip along a despotic road with nothing going on and which screams "cars only! no humans allowed!"? I prefer getting smaller grocery loads more frequently when the store is nearby, but when the trip is an ordeal, you go fewer big trips to avoid that as much as possible. A pleasant 15-20 minute walk to a store is much nicer than a 10 minute drive through an oppressive roadscape.

I live in the centre of a largish city in Europe. Here there's a few supermarkets less than five minutes away on foot, and the last one closes at ten every day of the week. They're also on the way to and from most other places I go. Usually I just buy what I need for tonight and tomorrow on my way home, or go after dinner when I'm likely to want a quick walk anyway.

Of course, I don't have kids and am generally not a very busy person, so it might not work for everyone.

I think a 24 hour economy should be a design goal of this city.

Because the serfs working in all the 24 hour establishments don't themselves need a life. There are also noise issues in mixed use neighborhoods as seem to be being advocated for. And business volumes don't justify 24 hour operation of most businesses.

> I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food.

We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.

So...

You can't eat when you're hungry, because you don't keep food at home.

A huge portion of your week is suddenly devoted to shuttling back and forth between home and the grocery store.

And you think that's not a massive inconvenience?

In a walkable city with small markets, you pop into the market as you walk past it on the way home from work, grab ~4 things for supper and carry them home. It takes about 5 minutes, and you do it 7 times a week.

In a surburb, you spend some time making a shopping list to ensure you don't forget something, drive to the store, spend at least 30 minutes getting everything (it takes at least 5 minutes to walk from one end of the store to another), spend time waiting in line and checking out, drive back, unpack, et cetera. The whole process takes about 2 hours.

Which is the massive inconvenience?

I'd question those numbers: 5 minutes for urban shopping and 2 hours for suburb shopping. So you're saying that in 7 5 minute stops (35 minutes), you're able to accomplish what it takes someone else in a suburban mega-grocery store to accomplish in 2 hours?

Apart from that, though, almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations involving a lot of repeated steps (going in, walking around, checking out, etc.).

When we go shopping on the weekends, we mostly buy for the entire week. We buy quantities of food that can make plenty of leftovers and buy water/soft drinks by the cases that last several weeks. We try to make the process as efficient as possible and we could stop by the store more often since it's close - but that would waste a lot of efficiency.

Carrying bottled water and soft drinks is a major hassle without a car.

That's why we just drink tap water, or water with syrup if you like something sweet (a bottle of syrup lasts a week). It's a lot cheaper, too.

If the choice is between driving to the store 1x a week vs 7x a week, then you have an excellent point, but if the choice is between driving 1x a week and walking 5-7x a week, in the long run the latter is much better for my health, and it replaces time I spend on the treadmill in the gym.

> almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations

Not always. When I cycle or catch the bus home, I pop into the shops near my house, grab some stuff I need, and then continue on the way. Or I grab stuff at the supermarket near work, and cycle home with it in a bag.

Now I don't need to plan a big trip. I am already traveling to go home.

It's more like 10, and you probably don't do it 7 days a week. You take a bus or train to your convenient stop near the market. Walk into the market, grab a basketful of goods, pay, walk home.

you're overlooking the price differences between these two modes of shopping.

There's no reason you can't combine the two. My experience in Padova was that there wasn't a huge difference, as the local supermarket wasn't a tiny corner store. Some items we'd buy in bulk less often with our car.

you pop into the market as you walk past it on the way home from work,

We're not European, we're not going to be European...ever. We just don't "pop in" to some market while we're walking by. We pop-in while we're driving by or we plan to drive 5 minutes to an awesome supermarket.

Just stop this constant crap about walking and "only if we're like some European village" crap that will never happen in America.

> that will never happen in America.

It happens a lot in New York City, and other dense urban areas in the US.

Where besides NYC? Nowhere. Americans like their cars. They like to drive. America is not the collectivist/statists that represent modern HN...which is pretty sick.

Hackers are anti-establishment! Hackers are not conformists that defer to government minders!

The insanity in your comment is the idea that urban density is the statist / authoritarian / corrupt central planning piece.

Try reading Louis Hyman's "Debtor Nation," particularly the bits on FHA and the creation of a national (and heavily subsidized) mortgage market.

The sub/exurbs, the essential symbiotes of car culture, are the dirigiste statist artifacts.

(yes, also a lot of the people who want to have you sell your Nissan Armada are also like that, and it's fair of you to call out statist authoritarian where you see them. But it's lunacy to suggest that suburbs and car culture just represent an organic Choice of the Free Market™)

It would be inconvenient to drive the American suburban minivan in traffic to the megamart on 5 acres of parking lot 3 miles outside a suburban sprawl, yes.

But for a large fraction of the world, it's more like this:

1. Step off bus you took home from city center job, having decided dinner recipe on the ride.

2. Buy fresh produce from independent grocery store on same block as bus stop.

3. Walk remaining 2.5 blocks home.

I think you have this internal representation of what "going to the store" means which is based on the North American suburban lifestyle of doing everything by car. This is not the model most of the world uses, especially not in old European cities.

Right...I've lived in Vienna and Berlin for over a decade (including a wife and child) and we never owned a car, and generally popped into the nearest supermarket for fetching backpack-sized loot every couple of days.

It's not really an inconvenience.

We had food at home, and went to the store 2/3 times a week. It was 5 minutes away by bike, so popping over was no problem, and it meant more fresh fruit and vegetables in our diet, too, which was nice. It was not an inconvenience, nor a "huge portion of my week". It was a small store that was quick to go through and get what I needed, not something like Costco. We did bulk buying elsewhere for other stuff, too, and took the car. It's nice to have the choice.

If I'm hungry, I grab more food when I drop by the grocery store. Unless my hunger pangs are randomly distributed in time and unrelated to my eating schedule, how is that a massive inconvenience?

That's not what was said at all. Nowhere do they say they don't keep food at home.

Eating what food you buy right away precludes storing food at home.

"right away" doesn't mean the instant you get home. It's more like the next two to three days.

Yes, in an urban environment you generally have less stored food. But usually not zero stored food. You also have less space to store it in, which makes shopping every other day more convenient. Trading off time for space and whatever conveniences urban living might provide you.

Eat some food. Not all of it.

I honestly don't see how you think this is a reasonable straw man you've constructed.

Because, in my lived experience, having to carry all my groceries around did in fact mean that I was chronically short on food at home. This is a description of a real problem involved in not having a car. Calling it a strawman won't make it less of a problem.

> Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?

I've carried 30+ kg of groceries on my bike panniers, about 15 to 30 min of ride to the store. Regular city bike with off-the-shelf panniers, not a cargo bike (which would easily take 100+ kg).

But quite honestly, I'd much rather get the groceries delivered to my home. I sometimes do but the websites to order the food are so bad that it takes more time to fill the order form that it's faster to ride to the store.

Bike is my primary means of transport for 8 months of the year because my city is awfully designed traffic-wise (if you need to cross the town east-west). A moderately fast bike ride beats any form of transport (including a car) on my daily commute.

If it's more efficient for you to make one trip to the store rather than several, it's even more efficient for the store to send one truck to make deliveries to many people in one trip.

Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.

That's true. But they don't.

Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard.

The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.

That's called a cart, see above.

No, you can't take a grocery cart on a bus.

Not true, in Los Angeles at least, outside of rush hour.

You moved the goal post also. In the thread above we are talking about a 10-minute walk.

No, we're not talking about a 10-minute walk. You responded to my comment 'It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.'

A cart is not actually responsive to that, because it reintroduces the other problem.

> There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?

If you want to respond to that comment, respond to that comment.

Yes you can. I see it in SF, all the time.

A surprising (to me) benefit of going from a car-based life for 35 years to a car-less life is that more frequent grocery trips have given me incentive to move away from processed foods to fresher foods.

Shopping once every 7 or 10 days obviates the advantage of the freshest produce, meat, etc. but when I'm shopping every couple days it makes a difference, and I've enjoyed cooking and eating more.

> Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?

A collapsible grocery cart (similar to a collapsible stroller), and insulated reusable grocery bags.

Spoken like someone who has never lived in a city. If the store is a 10min walk away, you go a few times a week. And/or you use one of those old lady carts.

Seriously, read my comment. I've lived exactly like that. It's awful.

Then you did something wrong. Don’t you pass on the way from school/uni/work to home by a store anyway? just hop out of the bus, buy stuff, and walk the rest.

I can carry a full week of groceries home in one of these (from a grocery store a 15 minute walk away):

https://www.amazon.com/UTG-Environment-Molle-3-Day-Deploymen...

(Sometimes if I'll buy eggs I'll carry those in a separate bag. How difficult.)

You can perfectly do it by walking or by bike. But still, how are you going to buy fresh meat/fish or even some fruits/vegetables by shopping only once a week? I go shopping usually 3 times a week, and it is a very enjoyable and relaxing activity.

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