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Ehhh, I don't know, groceries are pretty heavy if you cook at home all the time. I'm not usually the kind to make a big deal about small inconveniences, but back when I was biking, I decided to switch from potatoes to pasta or rice so that I wouldn't have to carry the extra water weight. Much, much easier to have it piped in or brought in a car. This was a young man with no kids who biked 20 miles to work every day.
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When I was living in a city, there was a small convenience store five minutes away, with prohibitively-high prices for my limited budget and very poor selection. If I wanted actual food, I needed to either walk 30 minutes uphill to the actual grocery store, or more frequently, take public transit to the other grocery store, at an hour and a half round-trip, which involved pulling a 40-60-lb shopping caddy up multiple flights of stairs and about a quarter-kilometer of 30-degree incline, often in the rain.
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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I loved it when I did it. I lived about four minutes from a grocery store and it was very convenient.
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Not a chance, unless you're counting convenience stores.
When I lived in a big dense city, I had two convenience stores within a 30 second walk of my apartment and five grocery stores within a five minute walk. One of them was pretty big.
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To be fair, until just last year the authoritative North American Industry Classification System did include both supermarkets and convenience stores within the overarching "grocery stores" category, so there is precedent for this nomenclature. (The 2022 edition of the NAICS now calls the overarching category "grocery and convenience retailers".)
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5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.
I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.
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