A very tiny number of people in the US live a 5 min walk from a grocery store.

Many people live within 5 miles of one, but usually in denser areas where 5 miles could easily take 30-60 min of travel.

>A very tiny number of people in the US live a 5 min walk from a grocery store.

That's exactly the problem. There needs to be more housing built near grocery stores, and more grocery stores built where the housing is, instead of 5 miles away.

Right, but in denser areas it's kind of crazy that more people aren't within 1-2 miles of a grocery store.

In my city, everyone I know lives within 1 mile of a grocery store, but they drive anyway. Many have kids and their groceries take up a lot of space, and they don't have the leisure time to spend on walking anyway.

So how does it work? How do you e.g. get your fresh bread in the morning? Are there some local community bakieries instead?

A small fraction of Americans shop daily for food. For the majority, it's a weekly (or even less frequent) occurrence.

And no, fresh bread is not really a thing, outside of a few urbanish settings. A healthy proportion of bakeries don't even sell bread - only pastries, cakes, etc.

Americans almost never buy fresh bread. We buy packaged bread with preservatives that lasts about a week (much longer if frozen or refrigerated).

Most of us don't go to the grocery store more than once or twice a week. When we do, it's often a big purchase that you can't carry back in your hands or on a small bike. You'd need something with more cargo space.

8km is about 20-35 minutes on a bike depending on infrastructure, I am sure it is zero minutes in many places due to lack of infrastructure. It is extremely cheap to build, and fast, look at Paris it is rapidly becoming a more bicycle friendly city, it is still carmagedon though.

When I grew up we went to a grocery store 5 miles away, even though the closest was only 2 blocks. Once in a while we walked to the close store, but it was so much more expensive than the farther away one that we just about paid for the entire cost of the car just on the grocery savings.

I can't control the prices of the local store, and so it is efficient to have the ability to choose other stores and thus force them to compete on price.