There's also seems to be a cultural stigma against walking, although I don't know how widespread it is. When I lived in California, people would actually laugh at me for walking places. "Only homeless people walk", I was told.
Downside to walking is a weekly family shop isn't easy to carry around.
The trick is that you pick stuff up “on your way home”, you aren’t making extra dedicated trips. Not hard to supplement with grocery deliveries these days either.
When I think back to the weekly grocery shopping I did with my parents as a kid? Those huge carts full of food, having to cover the entire store, then hauling it amd packing it in the car, then all the unpacking and organizing sorting and storing some of it in the main fridge and some in the backup fridge some in the pantry … to me that seems like way more hassle than speading the work out.
I have kids, tried different systems, more and smaller trips works for us. Probably it’s one of those things that everyone works out differently
What about that is a hassle?
right now i live a block down from a grocery store and a grocery run is 15 minutes tops.
because grocery shopping was such a hassle in the suburbs we did it once a week and tried to buy as much as possible to avoid going back. in the city i just grab whatever is on my list walking home from the train station.
Surely you mean "Unnecessarily oversized cars"
I wish American towns and cities were built in the traditional 4-over-1 style of places like Amsterdam, so that even in densely populated areas there was room for shops and restaurants that could survive off of foot traffic. When visiting old European cities not built around automotive infrastructure, it was so easy to get 5+ miles of walking in every day because everything is so close together.
California is vast, so there are many areas that are almost comically walk-proof, but there are also cities with a high average "walk score".
I live in a SoCal coastal city of 60K which has a fairly low "walk score" of 43. The services I'd need on a regular basis are in the neighborhood of a 20-45m walk (one way).