By "we", you really mean American suburbanites. Supermarkets are almost nonexistent in Germany, for example, and there aren't very many in Manhattan either.

I live within a 5-8 minute walk of half a dozen different grocery stores. It's great. I've lived in places where you need to drive, and I never want to go back to that.

After the Second World War, most additional housing was built in suburbs, massive highways were built--largely for military reasons but they also contributed to suburban sprawl, and the white urban population deliberately fled to suburbs in order to maintain racial segregation from the increasingly urbanized black population. Supermarkets were a side effect.