Do you not cook for yourself very frequently? Are you single or just don't have kids?
I seriously don't see how people who cook frequently for more than just 1 person get by without a cart without considerable inconvenience.
I seriously don't see how people who cook frequently for more than just 1 person get by without a cart without considerable inconvenience.
We’re not big meat nor processed food consumers, and ordering take-out food is oftentimes comparable (if you add in the opportunity cost of the time and energy spent cooking).
> ordering take-out food is oftentimes comparable
I find people who do the daily shopping thing tend to order more take out than people who do the bulk shopping thing. it might have to do with them skewing younger though
Gus's are not faster than a Safeway or Whole Foods in my experience, ethnic markets definitely are.
Versus just popping into the green grocer on your way back from whatever other walking or bicycling errand in the second most dense city in the US..
Also, what do your taste buds and nutritionist say about the value of produce freshness?
I think street parking difficulty really depends on the neighborhood, in general SF is no Manhattan. I also grew up in the city and based on my observation seem to find parking considerably faster than my peers, so YMMV.
When I lived near Dolores park, if it wasn't the weekend parking was really easy. In Divorce triangle, parking is a little harder but still not that bad.
e: Duboce triangle, not divorce triangle haha
Where we live now the super-market is oftentimes closer to our building’s entrance compared to where I park our car (the supermarket is obviously always in the same place, but the parking location is variable from day to day, depending on luck). Even at the place where we staid before this, the tram station was just across the street, so it was doable to get out of work, pass by the supermarket, get in the tram, home.
As I now work from home (since even before the pandemic) I value the shopping and the interaction with the supermarket’s cashiers for itself, not quite like in a Shop Around the Corner way but, nevertheless, it kind of builds some “community”-like vibe.
I also do the shopping for our two pets by walking to the pet-shop myself, it’s a 15-20 minute walk each way I’d say. It would be a little cheaper to buy their food online, in bulk, and would “save” that time that I spend walking to and back from the shop, but, like mentioned above, buying food for our pets while talking with the pet-food cashier about what new pet treats they have brought in or some other stuff like that is an experience that I value for itself.
I lived in Russia and Armenia and Czech Republic for quite a few years now, and the difference in how the cities are laid out is quite apparent; having a small but well stocked market every couple hundred meters really makes planning _far_ easier, and frequent trips are not a problem. Before COVID hit, it used to be that I'd just stop at the market on the first floor of my building and grab the few perishable essentials I needed (meat, some vegetables) and had plenty to cook for myself and for friends/neighbors that would visit.
This simply isn't the case in the US, even in the most modern cities. The corner markets/bodegas/whatever don't come close to what the common market in Europe has; you can get pretty alright quality _whatever_ at these markets, and leave the more exotic stuff (mostly asian ingredients/items or non-common spices) for when you go to a super market.
That isn't to say that no one ever does the traditional hypermarket run outside of the US; seeing babushkas and their hand carts packed with a week's worth of food and drinks trudging down the lane is a normal sight, but just as frequently they're stopping by the meat market near their commie block or by the small shops at the base of their building to get a few quick essentials.
It's honestly far more convenient; and at least prior to Ukraine situation, the home delivery options in Russia were fantastic, albeit a bit abusive of the work force when it came to wages.
I wonder if I could train one of these mutts to pull a cart.
The shop is 2min by car and next to my kids' school so it's quite convenient.
I could shop in a cheaper store further away but having fresh meat, fish, fruit and vegetables is a great plus.
There are 4 grocery stores in easy walking distance to me, and a few more within a 10 min drive. There are also over a dozen specialty markets in that same radius. And a weekly farmers market about a 10 min walk away.
I go food shopping ~3 times a week and just pick up what we need for the next couple of days.
Big box stores are different. I guess the prices on Amazon are now significantly higher and delivery is taking longer these days, to make the trip to a trip to a Walmart or Target. Still I don't understand how some people's eyes light up as they push around shopping carts.
It just shows me how much I don't understand other people's lives. And a reason to be even more polite when interacting with strangers.
Pick-up doesn't tend to list every option available. Pick-up also doesn't let you see the fruit or vegetables that are going into your cart until you've already paid. (I spend A LOT of money on fruit which approaches 50% of my diet on some days).
Delivery there is a fee and I by principal don't try to use services that incur a fee when I can perform the task myself. This is also why I don't use delivery for pizza.
I frankly don't trust strangers doing the pick-up. I've had to use this service a couple of times during self-isolation during the height of the pandemic and there was always something out-of-stock, which seemed implausible, as I never had an issue with my groceries being out of stock.
I don't see how shopping is boring or tiresome, it can definitely be agitating to have to deal with the entire spectrum of your local populous in a cramped labyrinth but you are walking, searching, and making decisions. It is definitely a chore though.
I'm visiting the grocery store at least once per day on average but I also live a mile away. With work-from-home/work-remote it helps to feed the social need in me, even if I'm not chatting with strangers, I'm seeing them.
This is the big one for me. All current grocery delivery options in my area rely on gig workers, which is essentially having any random person on the street touch your food.
I used to use Peapod, which had actual employees, so there's a bit of extra responsibility and in theory safety/reliability. Not really much worse than, say, a restaurant. Unfortunately they completely left the Midwest in Feb 2020 (great timing eh?).
Maybe these services use dark stores, where they aren't running around your local supermarket picking up items but have a private warehouse in the city. So lots of things are out of stock.
If you account for it objectively, no way.
I'm lazy and often do takeout, but it's definitely much more expensive. A $20 takeout meal can be done for less than $5 by cooking it all at home.
I did this for a few months right after work, which was in walking range. Eventually I went back to "shopping big" once every week after I moved and switched my employer, though. But it's doable.
e: I know that a lot of people do this (often because they don't own cars), but having lived in cities my whole life and done both approaches at various times, the infrequent large shipping trip is much faster when amortized over two weeks.
and for those saying all my produce is going to be spoiled or I must just be eating processed foods... absolutely not.
I have never lived in a suburb in my life, I am maybe 2 minutes walking from a small grocer and 5 from a larger. Still definitely save time (and money) by shopping big biweekly at the large grocer.
You are probably right about saving money by buying in bulk. Unfortunately then storage becomes a problem (we live in a small space).
I'm not five minutes from my own front door i.e. if I decide to go grocery shopping, the process of leaving my apartment takes at least five minutes.
Maybe in suburbia. In cities without insane rents and healthy work/life balances (IE: not NYC), there are often many grocery stores that make regular grocery shopping quite easy. (And rather fresh.)
Also regular grocery shopping means that people aren't loading up carts with 40+ items and in turn need 10 minutes to check out.
Grocery shopping becomes a non-item and promotes healthier inside cooking.
Working from home, there’s obviously no grocery store for me to pass by on my commute, so daily shopping would be 30 minutes a day (45 if I walked it) instead of 60 minutes once a week. That’s about the same as adding back my entire pre-COVID commute time. I’ll stick to weekly and spend the extra 2 hours per week doing something else.
Haven't been to a grocery store in over 2 years.
In suburbia it would be the most convenient, because suburbanites drive everywhere anyway. If your market is at the end of your block, it's still going to take you 15 minutes to get there and back in the best case.
People who shops just once a week can't value the freshness of what they eat at all. Or they just eat dry/frozen/industrial treated wares that don't spoil easily, but eating fresh really tastes a lot better.
Just disagree on vegetables, I am a massive veggie lover and the difference is not nearly as much as you are making it out to be. I don't each much processed food.
I also don't eat animal products, which might be influencing my opinion since I perceive those as fast to spoil.
Fruit, vegetables and bread will spoil in a few days.
Not in Europe. Maybe the reason it is crap in USA is because people don't shop daily and hence they don't buy good bread there? If you optimize bread to taste good after a week instead of tasting good after a day then I can see why American brands put so much sugar in their breads.
Sometimes I buy high quality bread from a small bakery. Tastes great and stays great. I find this applies to rye bread only. White bread doesn’t seem to work this way.
It does exist in Japan. You may think they’re healthy but they eat the worst wheat products imaginable. Even white bread isn’t white enough for them; they cut the crusts off their 711 sandwiches and have whiter than white meat buns.
Some are good, some are bad. Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece have usually pretty good bread in your typical supermarket. Northern countries tend to fare worse in my experience.
Heidelberg bread is pretty reliably decent quality, nearly always stays good for the amount of time it takes me to eat a full loaf, and is made with good ingredients.
To that 3x5 minutes of walking to and from the store, add 3x10 minutes for walking around the aisles picking food off the shelf, and another 3x5 minutes for checkout. That adds up to an hour a week. That's far short of "a few" hours.
Upthread you did respond to somebody saying daily, but the comment I responded to was itself a response to somebody saying "Hit up the store a couple of times a week, get what you need." To which you responded that it would take hours. I interpret "a couple of times a week" to mean every other day, or about 3 times a week.
Now if you walk there, all the stuff that you can buy is the stuff that you can carry. What I can carry is less than fits into a shopping cart, so I tend not to use a shopping cart, because I can feel on my shoulder what I am willing to carry home. If I'd take the car I'd have to find a parking lot when returning – and dependend on which one I find I might have to carry stuff anyways.
I guess european cities are very different to US cities in that regard.
Maybe you walk to the shops if they are close enough?
If not, that sounds wasteful.
Personally I try to spend as little time in the store as possible, so when I am in there I'll take extra of whatever keeps just so that I don't have to be in the store again any time soon. Better to spend an extra 5m grabbing everything for the next week than to come in again in two days time.
The bountiful produce production is mostly more noticeable in SoCal/central valley than in SF.
Other places on the east coast do have better groceries than NorCal and proximity to farms doesn’t seem to matter that much. Which makes sense; “eating local” and “farm to table” are not actually real things, wouldn’t be good for the environment if they were, and are mostly products of green meme boomers’ wishful thinking.
Until I moved out of Manhattan recently, the absolute best shopping experience was Gorillas, which had the "not available in the app if it's not available in real life" experience of Fresh, but also delivery in near real-time. I have started meals, found that I was missing an ingredient, and ordered it through Gorillas with no disruption to the meal prep time.
I don't think it's really doable unless you are single and you have big chain right on the way from work, otherwise small shops in convenient location next to your house will charge you premium compared to big discount chains
Not using a cart allows you to gauge the weight of everthing and it is especially useful if you walk or cycle to the supermarket. Now I am working from home so I just go several times a week, I definitely don't mind doing that as the first thing I want to do when I stop working is having a walk or a bicycle ride outside. Before I used to do that when commuting back home.
I live in a dense city and very close to grocery stores, this is still true.
Bonus: I don't have to take the car either.
but stated otherwise, you are saying that my getting a big order saves me 2 hours every time I do it. 10 minutes is also almost certainly an underestimate, assuming you live a 5 minute walk from the grocery store.
No, it takes less than a minute extra walk from my daily commute (walking), the rest of the nine minutes are to compensate for traversing the grocery store multiple times and wait in line at checkout.
If I expand it by another ~4 minutes I have other options as well.
If time was of extreme mindless essence I'd also take the bike.
Going daily to the grocery store costs lots of more time. The vast majority of people do not live a 1 minute walk from a grocery store, even in dense urban areas.
Doesn't apply to everyone of course (using a bike rather than walking dramatically helps though), but it does tie back to the US urban planning leaving a lot to be desired.
In the US, which was the point of my original comment. Here in Berlin I have at least 4 stores (Edeka, Lidl, Al Natura and a no-name Bio Markt ) in a 200m radius.
(edit: I am not one to complain about downvotes, but it is ridiculous to see this comment in gray, yet no one able to actually address the point. Bad urban planning and car-dependency in North America is intertwined with a lot of cultural aspects of the society, including this ridiculous notion that groceries are "inconvenient" and therefore better if done in bulk and/or less frequently)
These days you might face resistance to allowing light industrial again because people would accuse it of creating traffic and possibly leading people to park in front of their house - Nextdoor posters’ main principle is they should be able to park everywhere for free and nobody else should.
Do people really do that? The majority of what I get is the same across trips.
Also there's a thing we do that the daily shoppers sound unaware of: It's called a grocery list. A pad of paper left on the countertop that, at any time over those weeks, anyone in the house can add an item to if they want something different or know we're about to run out of. There's almost no planning involved.
That depends, it's recommended to walk a certain amount every day to stay healthy. If the trip to the grocery store is part of that, then you don't have to count it in the time spent.
Also, if you watch the video you will see that bi-weekly driving/parking for groceries eats more of your time budget than multiple small trips to a well-located shop.
most produce does not spoil anywhere near as fast as you are suggesting.
That's untrue. Produce, especially if bought fresh, keeps for longer than 2 days in the fridge.
Certain items keep longer than others - carrots (of which I am especially fond of snacking on) keep very well.
What doesn't last for two weeks in a fridge?
Maybe you refuse to, but you could. An organic head of lettuce easily lasts a week or more in the fridge. Anyway, the extent to which produce has been "designed" is greatly overstated. Two hundred years ago people used to store apples in barrels for weeks if not months.
I'm not in the US, I buy organic and local produce at a farmers market. They usually last two weeks in the fridge.
If they are lasting only three days for you, maybe you are buying produce that is already over a week old.
I was with you until this rather extreme statement.
It depends a lot on what "convenient" means. If you want fresh produce and meat and don't have the huge fridges that seem to exist in most American households, it's a lot more convenient to shop for fresh, newly arrived stuff at a small neighborhood grocer's every 2-3 days.
It's also a form of social contact, another thing which isn't really included in "convenience", but maybe should be; given how many people are talking about mental health problems caused by lack of social contact these days.
I don't eat animal products so that might be influencing my thoughts around food longevity though.
I was measuring convenience in terms of time. It seems from my observation that a lot of people also don't cook for themselves as much as we do, so they might get more value out of the small trip.
How far do you take this? If you don't have a refrigerator at all, or any way to prepare food at home, then it's more convenient to eat out three times a day.
For you.
I keep seeing your replies throughout this chain and I can't help but notice that you seem to be astounded by differences in what ultimately amounts to personal preference. What might be convenient shopping for you may not be convenient shopping for others. Lifestyle, locale, general eating habits and personal taste, among other things, are significant contributing factors to these differences.
Some people enjoy going on walks every day, some people order lots of take out, etc. All of those are acceptable. I am only largely disagreeing with the people who claim that somehow these two alternatives take a comparable amount of time (and the people suggesting that I must have no taste in vegetables or live in suburbia).
I don't think there is a single rule. I depends entirely which day/hour you do the shopping and where. When I lived in Switzerland supermarkets were closed from saturday at 5pm during the weekend. Which means doing your shopping on friday night or saturday would take a lot of time as a lot of people were doing the same. Doing it any other day of the week was much quieter.
I don't necessarily shop every day, but I do it several times a week. Also I don't buy my vegetables at the supermarket but at the fruteria (spanish place where you only buy fruits and vegetables). I mostly avoid premade dishes, I even do my own pizzas and tart doughs as well as bread sometimes. That means I am cooking every day. Problem with shopping once a week is I would have to decide for 7 breakfasts, 7 meals and at least 6 dinners. That is a lot of planning and live very little room for improvisation unless you are wiling to waste things or have a giant refrigerator which I have no room for in my european kitchen.
And yes I enjoy going out for a walk/ride every day after work so it is not annoying at all.
There is a lot of parameters to take into account, home space, schedules, shop opening hours, proximity, if tap water is drinkable and taste good...YMMV.
I think that is an overestimate because you can have leftovers and also breakfast is generally pretty easy, but I agree that there is greater planning overhead.
My partner and I compile a list of all the meals we want to make for the next two weeks before shopping, if you get in the habit it doesn't take too too long.
1. my fridge wouldn't be big enough
2. I have chosen to live carless because I don't have my own parking space and it is very difficult to find a parking space at any given time of the day close to my place.
3. I can only carry 2 european sized grocery shooping bags and a small backpack with my motorbike (a maxi scooter as they call it) when I go there with my gf. I can carry more in a hiking backpack if I go alone and I could theorically buy a bigger top case, similar to the big cube the pizza delivery riders are using but that would still be less than a fully loaded shopping cart.
And I am saying that someone may still find it more "convenient" to do so in spite of whatever additional time may or may not be involved. Convenience is far too nuanced and dependent upon personal preference for you to be stating, as an absolute, that it is not more convenient for someone to shop every day than it is once every week or two.
And I say this as someone who shops on a more weekly or bi-weekly basis.
The madhouse of a Costco or supermarkets on a weekend is time efficient, but it’s stressful.
A quiet and daily shopping experience can be a pleasant way to unwind after a day of work.
I usually decide what I want to cook on the evening when I go grocery shopping. Weekends kind of suck because I have to plan two days ahead. (and have to carry two days worth of food)
this is actually something I like about shopping into a basket. it forces me to be more intentional about my food choices. instead of a ton of snacks, I buy simple ingredients that can be combined into lots of different meals. it also prevents me from overflowing the pantry of my small apartment.
I typically allocate two thirds of my basket staples (milk, eggs, pasta, canned tomatoes, canned beans, rice) and top off the remaining third with whatever fruits/vegetables look good and possibly some chicken thighs or a nice steak. this is enough to feed myself for two weeks, though I could go as much as three if I go heavier on the staples.
obviously how you choose to shop is up to you. but you can fit a lot of healthy ingredients into a single basket if you're strategic about it.
Think about it.
As a result when I do go to a supermarket myself for something it's not enough to warrant more than a basket, but man is it a nightmare having to actually 'search' for stuff instead of just typing it into a box!
sometimes I do something really ridiculous which is get a pickup order for my non-produce items and then go into the store just to buy the produce.