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Right. When we go to grocery store, we do it twice a month, we load up the back of our car with anything we could need for two weeks or more, and we also can visit several stores because one has good meat, another good veggies and another good dog food, etc. Replacing all of it with a walk to single supermarket with as much stuff as we could carry in our hands (actually I could, my wife couldn't carry much for that far) would be an insane drop in our quality of life. And while we're not very young, we're also not old yet and mostly healthy. What about those who are less healthy and agile than us? This is one of those "good ideas" that can seem good to a college freshman but dissolves quickly one you apply it to real people living a real life.
I think you're comparing apples and oranges a bit.
In cities where people shop by foot shops are not placed randomly but in close proximity to public transit, so what happens is that you shop much more frequently as part of another activity, such as going to and from work, which means you shop way less each time and that you won't have very heavy bags to carry.
This of course means that turning a car focused city into a "15 minute city" requires far more fundamental changes than just adding shops and this might not be viable or even thought of by the proponents, which is likely to make changes in that direction just make things worse.
That is provided you can choose where you work and it's in a place near grocery store which carries all the things you need. And, of course, you have time and energy left after a full workday (or an energy to raise earlier - provided the store is open at that hour, and your workplace has storage facilities to store groceries for all the workers' shopping needs) to do the shopping. And you never buy anything you can't transport in your hands through an hour of commute.
At one period of my life, I have been commuting from my house in Bay Area to San Francisco office, on public transport. About an hour door to door. I've seen thousands of people doing the same commute. I don't remember many of them carrying groceries with them.
No, that's an Ameirca/Canadian/Australian thing. Explore, "walk" with google street view, clicking forward around in Istanbul, Chelyabinsk, Kyoto, random places in Africa whose names I don't know... There are grocery stores with better, cheaper and more variety of food than US supermarkets everywhere. It's mindboggling.
Ljubljana: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.0395398,14.4861671,15z search "spar", "mercator", "hoffer". You're rarely 2000 ft from multiple markets at any point. And those are just the chains. There are then plenty of independent butchers, some farmers markets etc.
This is how most of the world is.
Here's Szeged, a city in Hungary: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket/@46.2584053,20.1461581,14z searching grocery will give you different locations - near the same.
Now Guadalajara, Mexico https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery/@20.6755284,-103.3554495,15z
try mercado and tanguis, but a lot of stuff isn't actually there. Almost every corner will have a shop selling meat, dairy and fruit - often on a corner.
I've never been to Kyoto (maybe one day), but I severely doubt it about Chelyabinsk. I haven't been there either, but I have been to many many other Soviet city, and central planned system does not allow too much variety. So the way it works in Soviet cities (I am talking about 20th century of course, post-Soviet period is a bit different - the places are the same but the patterns shifted a bit) is that you have one bigger store (compared to US supermarket like Safeway) per micro-district and a bunch of smaller specialized stores (basically, bread, milk, eggs, basic veggies, you're done). The smaller stores are within ~10 mins walk from your dwelling usually. The bigger one would be about 20 minutes walk (on average, you could happen to live right next to it - or have to walk more, but probably no more than 30 minutes). No public transportation whatsoever within the micro-district whatsoever, if you can't walk for 20 minutes loaded with all the groceries that you need, you are so much screwed. Find someone who can, or subsist on the basic choices available in the mini-stores. The choice in the larger store would be about as good as in a below average US supermarket, with corrections for local conditions of course. The situation is a bit different if you live in the center of the city (majority of people don't since it'd be a) very expensive and b) there's just not that much residential space in the center) or in the places which are not part of the system of the micro-districts for reasons of remoteness or history. In the former, you'd probably have access to closer stores, in the latter you'd have to go farther.
The situation has changed a bit in post-Soviet times due to several factors: 1. people got access to personal transportation (of course nobody planned the parking nearly enough to cover the needs, so the parking situation usually would be not ideal) 2. There's now informal public transportation networks supplementing official transportation and 3. There are private markets and mini-stores popping up everywhere, which are usually hideously ugly, but significantly improve access to goods and groceries.
I don't understand this comment. Today is now, not 30 years ago. But you doubt things have changed while you give the historical background of what it was 30 years ago, then say it changed?!
Yes...?
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You don't carry them on the commute, there are supermarkets at literally every subway stop.
You get off at your stop, get your groceries from the supermarket right by the station and walk home with them.
Generally I would say that even the smaller stores carry 99% of what you would need but there can be reasons for you to go to a larger store occasionally anyway. I go to a larger store and buy a bunch of meat to keep in the freezer and larger packages of non-perishables, because those items significantly cheaper in the larger store.
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