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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I needed a hiking backpack to be able to haul milk, rice, and flour bags (walking 15 minutes with one of those and seeing how much flour you have left is always fun!)

And that was 20 year old me. What's an 80 year old woman in the same situation supposed to do, hop on her skateboard with a turkey under her arm?

Everyone going "oh, just spend 30 minutes walking to and from the store every day instead of shopping once a week" needs to take an economics class, or maybe they just don't see other people's time as having any value. Which would explain the Seattle bus system, come to think of it...

Plus the week after I moved out of that strip along I5, a guy got mugged on my store route. If people want to mandate how we live according to their urbanist fantasies, they should bloody well be made to fix their own cities first.

Our carfree home's solution to this is simply ordering most of our groceries using home delivery. Big delivery once every two weeks, costs 10-11 € per delivery which is partially recouped by the greater ability to select offers and cheap goods when shopping online as compared to being distracted by shit in the store, small replenishments throughout the week when coming back home to work etc.

Isn't home delivery an option in a lot of places? One would think that Covid would have made it more common.

I just stop by the store after work and grab enough for a few meals, a couple steaks, some veggies and other needs. Not sure why this seems weird.

I don't think things being within a 15 minute walking distance means people can't drive if they prefer.

I don't think things being within a 15 minute walking distance means people can't drive if they prefer.

It does, because the anti-car people are correct when they note that the space used for cars means distances must be greater.

I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I

I do not understand this 'discourse'.

There's a LIDL almost exactly 15 minutes away from my place.

If I went there with a hiking backpack - one of those big 60 liter backpacks I could probably cram in enough food for 10 days. Maybe even 14 if I went for dense stuff.

As things are, I have my old backpack - maybe 20l, and maybe a 15l ancient black shoulder bag for the lighter stuff. I can, without much trouble, get enough food for 5-6 days.

Sure, it's fairly heavy - if I'm buying for 5 days, it's 25 lbs. Half of that is milk, but in any case 25 lbs is no big deal to a guy unless he has muscular dystrophy or something like that.

If you were buying bottled water for a week in summer, you could make a case of walking being impractical, but I say bottled water is a scam and if your water is that bad, get a filter.

While I get the utility of cars, if I lived in the same spot I live in now and had a family, I could still do a weekly grocery run by simply getting a bigger backpack.

My record in load carrying was 120 lbs. Well, wasn't pleasant but hey, probably not hazardous to one's health seeing as soldiers do that all the time and they spend way, way more than 40 minutes a week on that.

Ehhh, I don't know, groceries are pretty heavy if you cook at home all the time. I'm not usually the kind to make a big deal about small inconveniences, but back when I was biking, I decided to switch from potatoes to pasta or rice so that I wouldn't have to carry the extra water weight. Much, much easier to have it piped in or brought in a car. This was a young man with no kids who biked 20 miles to work every day.

So fantasies about painful hourlong trips to carry back-breaking groceries back home for a (very suburban) once-a-week shopping trip are just that.

When I was living in a city, there was a small convenience store five minutes away, with prohibitively-high prices for my limited budget and very poor selection. If I wanted actual food, I needed to either walk 30 minutes uphill to the actual grocery store, or more frequently, take public transit to the other grocery store, at an hour and a half round-trip, which involved pulling a 40-60-lb shopping caddy up multiple flights of stairs and about a quarter-kilometer of 30-degree incline, often in the rain.

That really seems like a specifically American experience to me. I've lived in various cities all over Germany and Europe and never been in a situation where the next grocery store offering about 95% of what I'd buy in a month is farther away than 10 minutes on foot. From where I'm currently sitting in Berlin there are no less than 6 medium-sized supermarkets of varying price- and quality-ranges within that radius. In the north-eastern countryside where I spent parts of my youth every third village had a store run by one of the large German chains, so even for rural residents it was either 5 minutes by foot or 10 by car.

Well, Canadian in this case. Vancouver.

This is the same in the UK. Wherever I've lived, the closest shop has always been much more expensive than a larger supermarket, to the point where milk was double the price in the local corner shop compared to the nearest supermarket

I loved it when I did it. I lived about four minutes from a grocery store and it was very convenient.

In most dense cities the walk to the grocery store is more like 5 minutes than 15

Not a chance, unless you're counting convenience stores.

When I lived in a big dense city, I had two convenience stores within a 30 second walk of my apartment and five grocery stores within a five minute walk. One of them was pretty big.

To be fair, until just last year the authoritative North American Industry Classification System did include both supermarkets and convenience stores within the overarching "grocery stores" category, so there is precedent for this nomenclature. (The 2022 edition of the NAICS now calls the overarching category "grocery and convenience retailers".)

5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.

I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.

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