I do this with light rail. Takes 6 minutes with slow walking included. It’s pleasant.
Especially in the winter. I live in Norway, so if I use a car I wait for the engine to warm up before driving. (It’s better for the engine.) This and removal of ice and snow easily takes more than 6 minutes. I’m really glad I don’t have a car.
The fact people want to get in a car in order to get groceries is beyond me. I’m in Australia, where car brain is also very prevalent, but with many urban places good for walking and PT.
I live close to the shops, and go there multiple times a week because it’s literally right there. Driving and parking? Nah, I’m good.
Ideally we could just fucking walk to a small grocery store instead of having to drive to one. Also would increase jobs with more foot traffic.
If you are not disabled in anyway and still need to take a transport bigger than a bicycle to buy basic groceries, the design of the city you live in is fundamentally broken.
As a disabled person, thanks for remembering us. I’ll see these “just hop on your bike and pedal over!” comments and it’s kinda saddening.
There are disabled people in the Netherlands too. And they can move around the city in micro cars, mobility scooters, electric wheelchairs, etc… with confidence, because bike lanes network allows them to go anywhere, with way more autonomy and safety than in any other country.
Taking a train to the grocery store only seems absurd to people who have never experienced a really efficient rail system.
You get what you pay for.
I used to take the train to the grocery store. It was called the red line in Chicago
In Tokyo I’d hop on the subway regularly to shop. Not a big deal at all.
why would I take a train when the store is 3 minutes walking diatance
That’s literally communism and also the cause of everything wrong with the economy, that’s why!
My township is going through this
Vandalism, threats, people screaming in public, and so on; all afraid that the new area being built having stores within walking distance is a government conspiracy to restrict people’s ability to leave
…all the existing parts of town have grocers and shops within walking distance
Driving is for free people, walking is for slaves! /s
Light rail. All the time. Train isn’t only Amtrak.
This dude jokes but when I lived in Harlem I’d take the subway to Columbus circle Whole Foods as it was significantly easier than commuting to the east side on 125 to pathmark.
It’s actually called zoning reform. Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to. Before I experienced it, I never thought about how convenient it is to walk less than 5 minutes to a grocery store almost every day and do little grocery trips instead of bit multi-bag struggles.
Bring back neighborhood grocery stores you can walk to.
This is actually probably more a federal antitrust/competition law thing than a local zoning thing. Otherwise it wouldn’t have happened nationwide. I found this article to be pretty persuasive:
Food deserts are not an inevitable consequence of poverty or low population density, and they didn’t materialize around the country for no reason. Something happened. That something was a specific federal policy change in the 1980s. It was supposed to reward the biggest retail chains for their efficiency. Instead, it devastated poor and rural communities by pushing out grocery stores and inflating the cost of food. Food deserts will not go away until that mistake is reversed.
. . .
Congress responded in 1936 by passing the Robinson-Patman Act. The law essentially bans price discrimination, making it illegal for suppliers to offer preferential deals and for retailers to demand them. It does, however, allow businesses to pass along legitimate savings. If it truly costs less to sell a product by the truckload rather than by the case, for example, then suppliers can adjust their prices accordingly—just so long as every retailer who buys by the truckload gets the same discount.
. . .
During the decades when Robinson-Patman was enforced—part of the broader mid-century regime of vigorous antitrust—the grocery sector was highly competitive, with a wide range of stores vying for shoppers and a roughly equal balance of chains and independents. In 1954, the eight largest supermarket chains captured 25 percent of grocery sales. That statistic was virtually identical in 1982, although the specific companies on top had changed. As they had for decades, Americans in the early 1980s did more than half their grocery shopping at independent stores, including both single-location businesses and small, locally owned chains. Local grocers thrived alongside large, publicly traded companies such as Kroger and Safeway.
With discriminatory pricing outlawed, competition shifted onto other, healthier fronts. National chains scrambled to keep up with independents’ innovations, which included the first modern self-service supermarkets, and later, automatic doors, shopping carts, and loyalty programs. Meanwhile, independents worked to match the chains’ efficiency by forming wholesale cooperatives, which allowed them to buy goods in bulk and operate distribution systems on par with those of Kroger and A&P. A 1965 federal study that tracked grocery prices across multiple cities for a year found that large independent grocers were less than 1 percent more expensive than the big chains. The Robinson-Patman Act, in short, appears to have worked as intended throughout the mid-20th century.
Then it was abandoned. In the 1980s, convinced that tough antitrust enforcement was holding back American business, the Reagan administration set about dismantling it. The Robinson-Patman Act remained on the books, but the new regime saw it as an economically illiterate handout to inefficient small businesses. And so the government simply stopped enforcing it.
That move tipped the retail market in favor of the largest chains, who could once again wield their leverage over suppliers, just as A&P had done in the 1930s. Walmart was the first to fully grasp the implications of the new legal terrain. . . . Kroger, Safeway, and other supermarket chains followed suit. . . . Then, in the 1990s, they embarked on a merger spree. In just two years, Safeway acquired Vons and Dominick’s, while Fred Meyer absorbed Ralphs, Smith’s, and Quality Food Centers, before being swallowed by Kroger. The suspension of the Robinson-Patman Act had created an imperative to scale up.
A massive die-off of independent retailers followed. Squeezed by the big chains, suppliers were forced to offset their losses by raising prices for smaller retailers, creating a “waterbed effect” that amplified the disparity. Price discrimination spread beyond groceries, hobbling bookstores, pharmacies, and many other local businesses. From 1982 to 2017, the market share of independent retailers shrank from 53 percent to 22 percent.
The whole thing is worth reading.
Genuinely high quality post.
And yet another Reagan roast.
It’s definitely both.
If you can’t have smaller grocery stores in neighborhoods due to zoning laws, what will be left is bigger stores which are going to be generally operated by large corporations.
That would only explain the phenomenon in urban areas that actually have zoning. Rural areas are suffering from the same thing, but don’t have zoning restrictions, so obviously that points to another cause.
Another way that Reagan really shit the bed, huh
It sounds like he knew what he was doing, and it worked as intended. “Holding back American businesses” indeed.
Wow, one more thing to thank Reagan for that I was unaware of. Thank you for the link.
Thanks for sharing the article! It was very informative. I’m definitely going to remember it as the Robert pattinson law though.
In the US you’d be arrested for unlawful walking in a car only area, or something.
Would probably help with remembering reusable bags too. Instead of driving there and being like ‘oh no!’ you’re walking, and would realize you’re not carrying them with you.
People really need to commute for groceries? Like, I have the store 1 block away. Americans don’t know they can walk?
The closest (and not my preferred because it’s kind of expensive) grocery store would be a 2 hr round trip walking distance from me
That’s just fucked up, I’m so sorry.
Food deserts are a thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
They impact millions of people.
Yeah, it’s fucked up.
TIL
Most Americans leave too far away from any supermarket, even if there were roads that could take you there, either by walking or cycling.
I say it’s a business opportunity, why don’t Americans just open a small general store in their residential areas? Not everything need to come from a supermarket, here we have people that literally sell you vegetables in a rented garage.
Seems like the only acceptable usage of garages for you people are tech startups and maybe teenager bands lol.
I hope the answer is not “due to some obtuse regulation, residential areas can’t have business operating in any shape or form, unless is a tech startup or an ice cream truck”.
I want to also mention that smaller grocery stores used to exist but Walmart effectively outed them
https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/1bpbgia/how_bad_did_stores_like_walmart_kill_small/
I watched a video about the topic some time ago, it sheds some light upon the stuff
It’s not obtuse regulation, it’s explicitly by design. In most places in the US, you cannot operate a business in a residential area that serves the public. Businesses that do not do serve the public (like a tech startup or someone working from home) are fine. Ice cream trucks are also not allowed unless you have a proper business license / permit.
That laws sounds exactly like obtuse regulation to me. Why you cannot have a grocery store in your neighborhood? I really can’t think of a good reason. If there is a case for ice cream trucks, proper business license/permit and all that, it makes even less sense for other business types.
C’mon, you really need to commute to the supermarket to buy some bananas? That’s nonsense.
As an American that wishes for having stores just that close, the zoning laws are like that for a reason. That reason is to keep people dependent on cars. That is good for the fossil fuel industry.
I know it’s nonsense. A fair amount of people know it’s nonsense. But also a lot of people don’t know, because they can’t imagine a life without cars (or a life where you don’t need to drive to do every mundane task). They only know no car = no job, food, or socialization and they will fight hard to guard it.
C’mon, you really need to commute to the supermarket to buy some bananas?
In the US our culture has mostly adapted the grocery store routine to our car culture. The typical trip to the grocery store involves filling a large shopping cart with all the family’s food for the next week or two. People get in the car and drive a far distance to a big grocery store that sells everything. They buy more than they could ever carry, and they load it all into the car.
Also exacerbating this is how much we love shitty processed food. The big grocery stores have nice produce sections, but 80% of what’s in the store is shelf stable and in a box.
Zoning laws and NIMBYs
It turns out that, despite allegations to the contrary, the United States is actually small. Like, really, really tiny. We just don’t have the room to put supermarkets in places near where people live.
Well if they leave so far why don’t they return?
slow clap
I beg these people to imagine a world where you don’t need to get in a vehicle to buy essentials.
Working from home is the only way to really beat traffic.
No congestion at all. Not even an overcrowded train.
Greg is gonna shit on the floor when he’ll learn that happens everywhere in Europe.
In socialist Europe, I walk to the groceries, comrade… I take 15min train ride from home to work in the city center… and I wait no longer than 5 minutes on train because that’s its frequency… but I have no car…
Damn it must suck to live in such terrible conditions
Don’t a decent amount of European businesses even do delivery in back by train?
Probably, I mean it makes sense. The few times I’ve been in Europe, in the many cities I’ve been, the public transit was good.
“boss battle”
So fucking cringe.
The best is when the grocery stores are so close that you don’t need a car or a train. Japan does it right. You can always walk to at least one grocery store.
It’s not only Japan, I dare to say most countries have grocery stores within walkable distances.
It sure was great. We don’t have that at all in the US.
True enough for urban areas.
There’s also a lot of more rural areas in Japan where the only thing in walking distance from a house is a bus stop, and it might be a bit of a long walk.
I’m sure there are more remote places, but I haven’t been to those places.
I think the important part is that the Japan residents know it is possible once the town or city grows vs here in North America where people cannot fanthom the idea of not having a car (or in the US and Canada 1 car per person on the home).
I am privileged since I have been able to work from home recently, but it is so clear that you don’t need a car if non-work things were closer (better zoning and design roads for people instead of cars). Once you put 1k miles per year on your car instead of 10-20k and your quality of life is much higher due to no stress from having to commute it starts to radicalize you against into the dumb shit we do in the name of growth and profit (not violently but still makes you feel cheated out of a better life).
