I did the exact opposite and and it was most impactful quality of life upgrade I've ever done. I eat fresher and healthier food, I walk more, and I'm not tempted to snack on my stockpile of accumulated food.

Again go to Queens or Brooklyn plenty of suburban size and shape supermarkets.

Do you consider Red Hook to be suburban? Because the Fairway there is one of the best supermarkets I've ever been inside of in the USA ...

It's a 4-minute drive for me to get from my present house to the nearest grocery store (a Kroger of decent size).

I don't plan much for this journey. I don't bundle up on clothes or lace on a pair of stout boots first. I just kind of set forth (in my loafers) and drive over there -- even as everything is covered in snow, muck, and it it is 2 degrees (F) outside.

I went there last night for two tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and some cheese because those were the ingredients I was missing to make some tacos last night. While I was there, I remembered that I was running out of green tea at home and picked some of that up. I also grabbed a box of Barilla pasta because I walked by a display of it where it was on sale for 99 cents (oh noes they successfully upsold me on pantry supplies!).

There was no great investment of time or planning needed to accomplish this. I just went to the store for some odds and ends, and that was that. I might go back (or hit some other store) on my way home from work this evening -- since you mentioned apples, I kind of want one. (And I might buy exactly 1 apple. I can do that. It's Kroger, not Costco.)

I need to have the car anyway because it is necessary for me to own one in order to make money to stay alive in my environment. As long as this necessity remains, I might as well also use it for other things.

(I looked at some other addresses I've lived at, and their drive time to the local grocery store, on Google Maps. Despite "distance to grocery store" having not ever been on my radar at all when selecting a place to live, most of the places I've lived were a reported 2 minute drive to the local supermarket. The furthest was just 5 minutes out. I was pretty surprised by this at first, but looking back: That's actually a pretty fair estimate.)

I'm a Costco booster, and I have storage space. One of the greatest feelings for me is returning from a Costco and knowing I have enough in the house to last a month for a family of four.

But your second point is spot-on: this strategy has to be augmented by weekly (or more) runs to get fresh food. I like to make fried rice with vegetables, so having a local market is essential.

Small car towns are more or less the same. I drive 10 minutes to work, the stores are all on the way. It's easy to stop anytime.

The more local one is medium sized and I've been shopping there for years, so I don't really have to find anything.

I should go to the butcher that's a few blocks away more often though.

Maybe if you only shop at the mass market chains in the gentrified central part of the city. Go to Flushing and tell me that or just go to a Western Beef.

It’s what I’ve done in Seattle for decades and this isn’t even a very big city

> Is that really a thing though?

You need to be able to afford it as it it is more expensive, but yes it is.

I have the luck to live in a well served area: I have a Carrefour supermarket at about 200m from home yet I have 3 small markets closer than that. If I have to buy one or two things it doesn't matter if the supermarket is cheaper, in my mind spending 10 euros instead of 9 or 8 is worth it if it takes 5 minutes instead of 15. Moreover instead of having to interact with a bored cashier or an automated checkout machine, I will have a chat with a real person (yes, a cashier is a real person too, but most of the time doesn't act like one) . He will ask me how I am doing, put my stuff in the shopping bag and gasp smile at me. I think we lost sight of how those small things makes our life better.

The interesting part is, I always have to buy just 2-3 things because if it takes 5 minutes, whenever I need I just go out and buy it, so half of my shopping is not at the "big" supermarket.

I have to add though: I work from home, so for me shopping means having to go out just for that. Maybe if I was working at an office the dynamics would be different as I could just stop at a supermarket one the way home.

A family member lucked into a studio in Brooklyn for 1500.

A rent-stabilized studio from a slumlord who is regularly fined for violations, on the ground floor of an interior shaft, right inside the exterior door where people come and go all hours.

But she’s very happy about it and her friends are jealous.

In all these discussions it would be really nice to have actual addresses and locations because the dream is obviously desirable but I just don’t know how often it occurs in actuality.

Sure, Europe is different than the US in many ways. I think most people know that.

What is more surprising to me is that Europe has become relatively homogenous. There are more differences between some US states than there are between some European countries, if we set aside language. A mid size French city vs an equivalent German/British/Swiss/Italian city… they differ of course but Tampa vs Seattle is a bigger contrast to me.

There's probably 5 CVS locations (and 3 Chase private banking lobbies) between your subway stop and your apartment :)

Well I dunno to what extent the NYC lifestyle distorts the perception of stock market analysts. Do they think there are Duane Reades coast-to-coast?

I used to joke that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC in the 1990s because there were 2 or 3 Starbucks on every block to fool stock market analysts that the country was saturated with them -- thus driving out the independent espresso bars that you'd find in flyover states that had better coffee and leaving only the completely-indifferent-to-quality bodegas.

FWIW, I’m not confused about the two; I’m quite familiar with the NYC metro region.

I haven’t heard any Wegman’s fans comment on their NYC stores. I’ve heard multiple people wax poetic about Wegmans who frequented the Princeton-area store and the Ithaca store.

From my experience, I don’t get it, but I haven’t spent substantial time in either of those stores.

Whole Foods has always felt like Trader Joe’s - a great place to shop but few will shop only there - even for groceries.

Can you share some examples in gaps of staples?

My store used to have a big bread oven, desserts made in-house, fresh prepared food made in woks etc. right next to the buffet table, etc. All gone now; the coffee shop got replaced by robots, they tried to close the seafood counter (with enough negative feedback they reversed it), etc.

It's all made centrally now, for 3x the price and half the taste. All the kids went and got MBAs and the third generation family business curse hit hard as a result.

I've heard locals say "Bob Wegman loved people, Danny Wegman loves food, and Colleen Wegman loves money".

Yeah, it'd be our first stop whenever we came home from a trip; we even got Christmas presents from the store one year for being (embarassingly) one of their higher-spend customers. The magic has gone; places like Kroeger and Whole Food have caught up.