They’ve clearly never shopped at Costco. I can’t get out of there without dropping at least $200. Because, you don’t know you need a package of 50 AAA batteries, a gallon of mustard, 300 allergy pills, and a dozen rolls of Christmas wrapping paper until you’re there. Inside Costco that just makes sense.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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It would be so nice to live somewhere I could walk to the store. Or anywhere.
The non-American mind cannot conceive of living in a place so vast.
Europe is relatively small but their towns are waaay more compact because they were built before cars came around so most towns are already in favor of walking/biking distances.
But yeah America is huuuge. The drive from Paris to central Switzerland is about 12 and a half hours and it's a total change of scenery. For the US that's just California to Utah. Or Washington DC to Charleston SC.
What the US needs badly is high speed rail from city to city
I mean we do need that, but that has nothing to do with the problem. the majority of people don't live in those vast expanses of nothingness. Most of our cities are just as populated as most European cities, we just have shit laws around zoning, single family housing, population density, NIMBYs blocking any change, and people that think public transit is for poor people. They don't travel to other countries and so have no clue how good things could actually be.
we just have shit laws around zoning
Yeah above all else I think that is the biggest issue. There are daft rules about the size of carparks that mean that, what would be a local store in the EU, becomes this vast strip mall in the US with 12 acres of parking lot to walk across so you can get your milk.
You practically need a car to just drive across the vast expanses of car infrastructure. Crossing the road in the US is something you have to plan your day around
Yeah, it's a shithole country which is why I got rid of my car, let my driver's license expire, and left the country. Looking back, it was pretty prescient considering how fascism-y it has gotten there.
In, roughly, 12 hours I can get from pennsylvania to florida. DC to Charleston should not take that long.
- I actually looked up my last trip from where I used to live. it was 14 hours and 12 minutes. So a little over 12, but point still stands.
Yeah but you did just describe massive changes in scenery in America. You can do 12 hours of the same here for sure, the great plains are really big, but usually 12 hours of driving later the scenery has changed. It's 14 hours from Duluth Minnesota which is on Lake Superior to Sundance Wyoming which has the devil's tower monument and is past the great long stretches of nothing that makes up the bulk of the Dakotas. Des Moines is a city surrounded by nothing but corn and open road (with a distinct feel from the Dakotas) and is 12 hours from Memphis Tennessee which is adjacent to Appalachia. Baltimore Maryland, a coastal city on the Chesapeake Bay and near a bunch of swamps driving 12 hours west and north can get you into and out of the Appalachian Mountains (and not a short cut of them), barely dodging Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo (with an optional roller coaster detour at Sandusky) while you hug Lake Erie, do the entire border of Michigan and Indiana before landing in Michigan City, Indiana on Lake Michigan, which looks like it's just outside Chicagoland.
And out of curiosity I checked what a cross country trip looks like, NYC to Los Angeles is 50 hours, while the longest road trip between frequent destinations is Key West to Seattle at 63 hours. The latter of these begins on a tropical island, goes through swamps, deep south agricultural areas, Appalachia, Midwestern agriculture, the Mississippi River, Midwest agriculture, great plains, badlands, Rockies, pnw valleys, cascade mountains, and ends in a rainy ass wetlands, but this one has wild disparity between day length over the year.
More like living in a place where it can be impossible to cross a short distance on foot when it wouldn't be impossible to add a walking path.
Sounds so... Odd to me.
My entire life I've lived in a very dense city. Everywhere I look are stores, people, traffic. There's never a single moment of silence, not even at night.
I low-key feel jealous to people who live in a quiet place...
Where in the world can you buy a week's groceries for $50?
Depends on how many people live in your household and what you eat. You can probably spend even less if you're only cooking for one and most meals are 'beans and rice'-level.
I'd assume that the hard part is finding an affordable place in a somewhat walkable neighborhood in the US, especially if you don't want to live in a one-room apartment.
Either way, the $50 are really not the important part. It would still be true if you paid $200 and could save $50 by shopping at cheaper supermarkets that are further away.
Also if you are walking to the store, you are limiting the amount you can buy as you have to transport it back home. I have a nice little collapsible cart I use. Even that fills up and gets heavy once you are adding beverages.
Adding beverages is wasting money anyway, just drink water
REMEMBER THE ONLY WAY TO BE FRUGAL IS TO NEVER DO ANYTHING THAT BRINGS YOU PLEASURE, OR EAT ANYTHING BUT BEANS/RICE AND DRINK ONLY WATER.
This is what people who say shit like that sound to folks who know that life is not meant to just be survived, but enjoyed.
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True, you're definitely missing out on a lot of bulk items, especially when you're living in a smaller apartment and don't even have the space to store 10 pound bags. And you pretty much have to go to the store multiple times a week.
in my country if you ignore meat its almost that
If you are extremely frugal everywhere, even the US
I reckon I could do it for one person, but I'd have to cut down on bacon.
But it depends on where you live.
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I never thought about it like that! I did in fact buy the car specifically to go to the grocery store and don't use it for anything else
Can't you just order groceries? Isn't that a thing in the US?
Have you considered renting? Depending on the business model, that could be very cheap if it's just a couple of hours per week.
Renting a car? Oh... You mean like, subscribing? The type of payment model where the consumer always ends up overpaying when needing to use the service for extended periods of time?
That's only a subscription if you keep the car 24/7, it's a completely different thing if you only rent for a couple of hours per week. Even renting a car for a day (which might be the shortest amount of time you can rent a car in many places) wouldn't be a subscription, though at that point it might not be cheaper than owning anymore.
The car rental place is further away from me than the grocery store.
Where I live, the concept is called "car sharing". There are two small cars just across the street and if I need one, it costs 2,50 € per hour plus maybe 0,30 € per kilometer, fuel included. So if I need to make a weekly grocery run to one of the large stores, it's probably just a little over 10-12 Euros for three hours all told.
Now, I own a car that's older and too cheap to not keep it for longer drives when I am seeing my family (roughly an hour each way) at the weekends, but for my day-to-day needs, I probably shouldn't own one.
Car2go was such an awesome service. I missed it very much when it went......I don't know, where did it go?
Or instacart.
The closest grocery store is 1.5 hour walk. I'm not doing that in a Canadian winter or with hands full of groceries. And no, it's not bikeable 5 months a year.
Also, I've bought four cars in my lifetime. I spent a combined $13,000 on them. My first car was $1400 and I still have it.
ehm Canadian winter will make sure the food does not spoil on the way ☺️
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Who's putting $200 of gas in their car per month, what you doing driving the Route 66 on a weekly basis? The shops all of 5 miles away if it's that.
Average US driving distance is about 14k miles per year, or about 1200/month. At 30 mpg, you need 40 gal per month. Current price per gal in the US (according to AAA) is $3.193/gal, which gets us $130/month in gas.
Wouldn't have to be crazy above average to get to $200/month. Or have a car with kinda bad fuel efficiency.
I did when I had a really shitty commute for about a year and a half. Crazy thing is it wasn’t even that bad compared to some of my coworkers there.
If your commute is about an hour each way you're probably spending roughly that much.
Not having a car wouldn't be an option then.
"walk to a store" lol okay bro doesn't know wtf they're talking about.
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