Unless you live in the US with its Euclidean Zoning laws which prohibit mixing land use types in a lot of the country. Groceries are commercial use, and so have to go in commercial developments. Plus the big box stores have killed off most of the small grocers, so you have to go to the strip mall on the edge of town.

[–] daltotron@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago

This. Have no clue where these people are living, probably in proximity to a larger city, but everywhere I've ever lived (mostly smalltown shitsville suburban america), your options are maybe a corner store that has your bare essentials, at an insane markup (mostly, I suspect, in order to exploit people who don't own a car, forgot something on their way to the grocery, whatever. Capitalize on proximity.), or like, a 20 minute drive to the grocery store. 20 minutes both ways, plus the time you spend in the store, and parking, and traffic. That's probably like an hour out of your day, at the least. Probably more, since you're usually getting all your week's worth of groceries at once, since you wanna minmax your time.

Being in a commercial district and not an industrial one, and, being as most people drive their cars everywhere, and everything tends to be spread out to meet parking minimums, you probably don't end up close enough to the grocery store to pick up stuff on your way back from most of the other things you're gonna be doing. It all leads to more dedicated trips where you want to plan out more thoroughly what you're buying and what you're eating through the whole week, there's not a lot of spontaneity there. Even plan out what you're doing for fun, which I think is kind of antithetical to the idea of having fun.

I have never lived in a place where all of this wasn't the case.