As an immigrant, I'd say you are definitely on to something here, with your 3-2-1 reverse approach. In fact, if you look at a typical village in India, the hou

As an immigrant, I'd say you are definitely on to something here, with your 3-2-1 reverse approach. In fact, if you look at a typical village in India, the housewife isn't going to have the time or means to "visit a preferred grocery store after making a shopping list" - the stores come to you! People live in narrow streets. On a given day, only 4-5 pushcarts can ply a given street. So the pushcart vendors decide among themselves which streets they will ply. Say you live in Street A. On a Monday, the carrot, tomato, potato, peas and beans pushcarts will visit your street. The housewife is now constrained by her daily shopping budget. The pushcart vendor is constrained by how much produce he can physically push on his cart. They are both constrained by the number of people living on the street & the haggling capacity of each person. All of these constraints then resolve into which produce gets bought & in what quantity. Say the housewife ends up with half a kilo of beans and some tomatoes -> that day the family eats beans curry and some warm tomato soup for dinner. This is how we ate for decades back in India. Once my mom came to the US on a vacation and I introduced to her the concept of eating-what-you-want and going to a Safeway and buying-tomatoes-in-winter-just-because ...all of that was pretty foreign & mind-blowing to her.