There's a feedback cycle here. If it's long and difficult to get to the store, you need to buy a lot to make it worth the time. If it's easy and quick to get to the store, you don't need to buy nearly as much. Carrying a single small bag of groceries for 10 minutes shouldn't be a big deal.
I live in a city (Seattle) and walk to the grocery store. I usually only buy one bag of groceries at a time. The grocery store is less than a 5 minute walk, so I don't need to make big trips and can make small trips often.
In large cities you have many small supermarkets within a short walking distance from your house. It takes 20 minutes to do a quick shopping run to pick up what's needed. It's true that groceries are more expensive than at Costco...but you also don't need a massive deep freeze + pantry to keep all of your extra stuff, or a big car to carry it all in.
When you live in a walkable neighborhood, you quickly realize that you don't need to get groceries for two weeks in one trip. I go to the grocery store 4-5 times per week, spending maybe 10-15 minutes max each time.
Its worth noting that in walkable cities people shop more frequently as a rule. If where you do your shopping is within a short walk of your home it becomes practical to buy stuff most days. In fact if you are traveling to and from work or anywhere else its likely you will pass by somewhere you can buy your groceries as you go about your business so there is zero additional travel time added by buying groceries every day.
If you are only concerned with what groceries you will require in the next 24 hours then carrying the required groceries for a large family isn't such a big deal.
And if grocery shopping every day sounds like an ordeal remember that everyone else is doing it too so generally everyone is only buying a handful of items. No trolleys piled high with stuff.
Yeah, that’s a big part of it. If you have shops within walkable distance, you don’t need to carry huge amounts of groceries. You can just grab a few things to last you the next three days on your way past!
That's all true, though I usually stop at a grocery store on my way home, so I'm not spending a lot of travel time. Honestly the worst part of grocery shopping is getting out of the store with your stuff, because of checkout lines. I suppose if you're not stocking up though, you may be able to get away with express laning it more often than I do.
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.
> 10 minutes is also almost certainly an underestimate, assuming you live a 5 minute walk from the grocery store.
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.
But if you pass food stores on your way home anyway, why not shop every day. A weeks worth of groceries is a a bit of a pain to carry no matter how you look at it.
I really don't think most people would choose to carey groceries for 10 minutes. I'd drive a half hour as opposed to carrying groceries for 10 minutes.
If going to get groceries only takes you a couple minutes each way then it becomes much more reasonable to carry a backpack full of fresh groceries rather than a car full of food that will become stale.
Density enables rapid transport as well as many more shops in a given area.
And even if I could: I'm not lugging around several bags of groceries and other sundries that entire distance back to my residence.
The way shopping for groceries works here in the US is that we buy enough goods to last us a week or two. That simply isn't happening with just two hands and feet, or even a bicycle.
I live in what would be called a 15 minute city, but we don't really call it that.
I just bring a bag or two and ride my bike to the store. Or if I'm downtown, which is a 10 minute train ride away, I'll stop by the grocery store next to the station before hopping on the train and just carry my groceries in a bag or put em in my backpack.
The only times I choose to drive are when I want to get a large quantity of something lightweight, like toilet paper or paper towels.
I typically don't buy a lot at once, I'll plan my meals for the next few days and only buy what I know will definitely get eaten to reduce waste.
Stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work added about 20-30 minutes to my commute every day of the week, which got to be enough of a hassle I bought my own grocery cart and now walk to the store with it once every 1-2 weeks - and that trip is typically only around 50 minutes. Nearly half of it is just walking to/from the store, so I expect a car would be even less time.
It's not nearly as straightforward as everyone here wants to make it.
If you live reasonably close to a grocery store, you can actually go once per day and don't need to carry that much at any one time. On the plus side the food is more fresh because it didn't have to sit around for a week or two.
Though of course, you can always get a cart or something.
Going to the grocery store is actually pretty time-consuming. That's true even though I live within a few blocks of one.
I just did some back-of-the-envelope math and determined that the minimum time it could take for me to go to the grocery store and come back, from door to door, is about 40 minutes, and the maximum is about 2 hours. I took into account everything from walking to my car in the parking garage and getting out of the garage to finding a parking spot, waiting in line to check out, hitting traffic lights on the way there and back, etc.
I think this is why I don't cook as much as I'd like to. I can either spend 40 minutes getting groceries and then needing to cook a meal and then eating it, or I can spend 40 minutes picking up, say, Chipotle, which includes eating the food.
Most people don't buy a month's worth of groceries at once, though. When there is a grocery store right next to the train station, you just get what you need for the next two or three days when you pass the store during your daily commute.
10 minutes to check out every two weeks compared to 14 separate shopping trips that take 5 minutes each to check out (and 10-30 minutes to travel and from the market each visit in either case) isn't significant.
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.
> Unless you're cooped up in your home every day you'll cycle past a grocery store on your way home from something else, so you can easily pop in an grab what you need.
It's more expensive to buy in small daily quantities though. It'd be cheaper to buy in bulk and only go once a month or so.
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