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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
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