- Carried the bags
- Used a backpack
- Used a push-cart (can carry groceries for 5 people for a week)
- Biked (with panniers)
- Biked (with a trailer -- can carry groceries for 10 people for a week)
- Jogged, when I just needed something small on short notice for a cooking project!
https://www.amazon.com/Whitmor-6318-2678-Deluxe-Rolling-Util...
They do make bigger ones, but much bigger and you're better off with a second person.
> Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.
Another perspective, a ten minute walk a few times a week is much better for quality of health (therefore life) than taking a car everywhere.
Of course, I don't have kids and am generally not a very busy person, so it might not work for everyone.
We mostly walked or biked to the local grocery store in Italy. It led to more fresh food, as you buy stuff in smaller quantities and eat it right away. A large backpack is fine for moving stuff. It worked for our family of 4.
You can't eat when you're hungry, because you don't keep food at home.
A huge portion of your week is suddenly devoted to shuttling back and forth between home and the grocery store.
And you think that's not a massive inconvenience?
In a surburb, you spend some time making a shopping list to ensure you don't forget something, drive to the store, spend at least 30 minutes getting everything (it takes at least 5 minutes to walk from one end of the store to another), spend time waiting in line and checking out, drive back, unpack, et cetera. The whole process takes about 2 hours.
Which is the massive inconvenience?
Apart from that, though, almost anything that you can easily plan out and do in bulk is going to out-efficiency something done in smaller iterations involving a lot of repeated steps (going in, walking around, checking out, etc.).
When we go shopping on the weekends, we mostly buy for the entire week. We buy quantities of food that can make plenty of leftovers and buy water/soft drinks by the cases that last several weeks. We try to make the process as efficient as possible and we could stop by the store more often since it's close - but that would waste a lot of efficiency.
That's why we just drink tap water, or water with syrup if you like something sweet (a bottle of syrup lasts a week). It's a lot cheaper, too.
Not always. When I cycle or catch the bus home, I pop into the shops near my house, grab some stuff I need, and then continue on the way. Or I grab stuff at the supermarket near work, and cycle home with it in a bag.
Now I don't need to plan a big trip. I am already traveling to go home.
We're not European, we're not going to be European...ever. We just don't "pop in" to some market while we're walking by. We pop-in while we're driving by or we plan to drive 5 minutes to an awesome supermarket.
Just stop this constant crap about walking and "only if we're like some European village" crap that will never happen in America.
It happens a lot in New York City, and other dense urban areas in the US.
Hackers are anti-establishment! Hackers are not conformists that defer to government minders!
Try reading Louis Hyman's "Debtor Nation," particularly the bits on FHA and the creation of a national (and heavily subsidized) mortgage market.
The sub/exurbs, the essential symbiotes of car culture, are the dirigiste statist artifacts.
(yes, also a lot of the people who want to have you sell your Nissan Armada are also like that, and it's fair of you to call out statist authoritarian where you see them. But it's lunacy to suggest that suburbs and car culture just represent an organic Choice of the Free Market™)
But for a large fraction of the world, it's more like this:
1. Step off bus you took home from city center job, having decided dinner recipe on the ride.
2. Buy fresh produce from independent grocery store on same block as bus stop.
3. Walk remaining 2.5 blocks home.
It's not really an inconvenience.
Yes, in an urban environment you generally have less stored food. But usually not zero stored food. You also have less space to store it in, which makes shopping every other day more convenient. Trading off time for space and whatever conveniences urban living might provide you.
I honestly don't see how you think this is a reasonable straw man you've constructed.
I've carried 30+ kg of groceries on my bike panniers, about 15 to 30 min of ride to the store. Regular city bike with off-the-shelf panniers, not a cargo bike (which would easily take 100+ kg).
But quite honestly, I'd much rather get the groceries delivered to my home. I sometimes do but the websites to order the food are so bad that it takes more time to fill the order form that it's faster to ride to the store.
Bike is my primary means of transport for 8 months of the year because my city is awfully designed traffic-wise (if you need to cross the town east-west). A moderately fast bike ride beats any form of transport (including a car) on my daily commute.
Even more so if enough people do so that the store can switch from a storefront laid out for customers (with cashiers, displays, and tags on shelves) to a warehouse.
Safeway has a long-running delivery program, but they sure aren't pushing it very hard.
The system in Shanghai, where you might expect delivery to be popular, is that supermarkets operate their own buses which stop near your home. It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.
You moved the goal post also. In the thread above we are talking about a 10-minute walk.
A cart is not actually responsive to that, because it reintroduces the other problem.
Shopping once every 7 or 10 days obviates the advantage of the freshest produce, meat, etc. but when I'm shopping every couple days it makes a difference, and I've enjoyed cooking and eating more.
A collapsible grocery cart (similar to a collapsible stroller), and insulated reusable grocery bags.
https://www.amazon.com/UTG-Environment-Molle-3-Day-Deploymen...
(Sometimes if I'll buy eggs I'll carry those in a separate bag. How difficult.)
There's a bigger issue here. Suppose the grocery store was 10 minutes away. You'd still need to drive there, because how are you going to get the food back to your house?
I have lived carless and had to make many independent trips per week to buy food. Being able to do it all at once is an enormous upgrade to quality of life.