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You just shop on a daily basis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I did this for a few months right after work, which was in walking range. Eventually I went back to "shopping big" on

• whimsicalism 4y ago
  ah yes, the considerable inconvenience part of my comment. e: I know that a lot of people do this (often because they don't own cars), but having lived in cities my whole life and done both approaches at various times, the infrequent large shipping trip is much faster when amortized over two weeks. and for those saying all my produce is going to be spoiled or I must just be eating processed foods... absolutely not.
  • I-M-S 4y ago
    Do you live in a suburban environment? Because where I live it's not unusual to pass the grocery store every day while walking back home and buy groceries for the day. It's only for the big shopping trip on the weekends that I use the trolley (and even then the trip is done on foot).
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      Why do you have the big shopping trip on the weekends? I have never lived in a suburb in my life, I am maybe 2 minutes walking from a small grocer and 5 from a larger. Still definitely save time (and money) by shopping big biweekly at the large grocer.
      • I-M-S 4y ago
        My spouse works regular hours and it's easier to carry stuff with two people. You are probably right about saving money by buying in bulk. Unfortunately then storage becomes a problem (we live in a small space).
      • pessimizer 4y ago
        > 2 minutes walking from a small grocer and 5 from a larger I'm not five minutes from my own front door i.e. if I decide to go grocery shopping, the process of leaving my apartment takes at least five minutes.
        • whimsicalism 4y ago
          I agree, this seems to be bolstering my own point though.
  • intsunny 4y ago
    > ah yes, the considerable inconvenience part of my comment. Maybe in suburbia. In cities without insane rents and healthy work/life balances (IE: not NYC), there are often many grocery stores that make regular grocery shopping quite easy. (And rather fresh.) Also regular grocery shopping means that people aren't loading up carts with 40+ items and in turn need 10 minutes to check out. Grocery shopping becomes a non-item and promotes healthier inside cooking.
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      I have never ever lived in a suburb and what I am saying is still true. It is simple economies of scale in relation to checking out time, if you go every day you are going to be spending more time than I do amortized over two weeks.
    • sokoloff 4y ago
      We shop weekly (taking about an hour from leaving the house to returning, less when we frequently manage to attach it to a trip where we’re already out). Working from home, there’s obviously no grocery store for me to pass by on my commute, so daily shopping would be 30 minutes a day (45 if I walked it) instead of 60 minutes once a week. That’s about the same as adding back my entire pre-COVID commute time. I’ll stick to weekly and spend the extra 2 hours per week doing something else.
    • alar44 4y ago
      This is why I started using instacart. I'd go to the grocery store a couple times a week for a handful of items, but would have to wait in line for 20 minutes while people checked out a mountain of stuff. Haven't been to a grocery store in over 2 years.
      • xeromal 4y ago
        It's easy to hate on Amazon these days, but there's an Amazon grocery store near me that has buggies with a bunch of tech on them. I throw all my items in the buggy and I push it out the store and receive an emailed receipt. I don't have to wait in line. I like instacart too, but occasionally I just want to browse so I can muster up some recipes in my head.
  • goosedragons 4y ago
    It really depends where you live. In some place like the US suburbs where the nearest grocery store is a 10+ min drive away yeah it can be a considerable inconvenience. But when you live in a city centre and it's a couple min detour from your walk home it's not a big deal. You can have fresher produce, fresh meat, breads that don't need to be shelf stable for a week, etc. It doesn't have to be inconvenient and it can bring a lot of advantages.
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      I have only ever lived in city centers, it is still faster to buy in bulk. I am vegan so maybe I am not appropriately weighting the fresh meat concerns, most of the stuff I buy does not spoil as easily.
      • Jensson 4y ago
        Don't you buy bread? Bread spoils in a few days unless you put a lot of shit in it and every day stored makes it taste worse. Or even most fruits and vegetables, they taste significantly worse after a week. People who shops just once a week can't value the freshness of what they eat at all. Or they just eat dry/frozen/industrial treated wares that don't spoil easily, but eating fresh really tastes a lot better.
        • whimsicalism 4y ago
          Okay, the bread point is true - I will grant you that. I happen to live very close to a small market but wouldn't buy anything other than bread there because they certainly charge for the convenience. You can also bag and freeze bread, but there is a decrease in quality. Just disagree on vegetables, I am a massive veggie lover and the difference is not nearly as much as you are making it out to be. I don't each much processed food. I also don't eat animal products, which might be influencing my opinion since I perceive those as fast to spoil.
          • jokethrowaway 4y ago
  • egypturnash 4y ago
    It’s not terribly inconvenient if the store is in walking distance. Especially if work’s in walking distance and the store’s on your way home from work. Or if you work from home. I’ve been in this situation too, it’s really nice. Hit up the store a couple of times a week, get what you need.
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      it's probably to the tune of a few hours a week or so of your time, you value that as you want.
      • robonerd 4y ago
        If you shop several times a week, each shopping trip is short. It'll all add up to maybe an hour a week, not several hours.
        • whimsicalism 4y ago
          if it's a 5 minute walk, it already adds up to an hour before you count the multiplied checkout, shopping, etc. time.
          • robonerd 4y ago
            The walk doesn't count because it's two blocks away and I walk anyway around regardless of whether I'm grocery shopping, but sure, throw in 3x5 minutes walking for 3 grocery store trips a week (I average 1 or 2 a week, but whatever.) To that 3x5 minutes of walking to and from the store, add 3x10 minutes for walking around the aisles picking food off the shelf, and another 3x5 minutes for checkout. That adds up to an hour a week. That's far short of "a few" hours.
            • whimsicalism 4y ago
              5 minute walk to the store means 10 round trip, let's say 25 total with your other numbers (although I think your aisles estimate is an overestimate given it should scale by how much stuff you are getting), then multiplying by 14 as the person I was replying to says they go daily and I go biweekly and I save ~5 hours per biweekly large trip I go on.
  • atoav 4y ago
    It also depends on where you live. For me going to the supermarket means walking 60 meters to the next one across the street. Except for when I lived on the countryside I never lived anywhere where going to the supermarket by car would have been faster than just walking there. Now if you walk there, all the stuff that you can buy is the stuff that you can carry. What I can carry is less than fits into a shopping cart, so I tend not to use a shopping cart, because I can feel on my shoulder what I am willing to carry home. If I'd take the car I'd have to find a parking lot when returning – and dependend on which one I find I might have to carry stuff anyways. I guess european cities are very different to US cities in that regard.
  • jen20 4y ago
    The inconvenience is having to decide up front what you might want to eat for a week, not shopping every day.
• lelanthran 4y ago
  > You just shop on a daily basis. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe you walk to the shops if they are close enough? If not, that sounds wasteful. Personally I try to spend as little time in the store as possible, so when I am in there I'll take extra of whatever keeps just so that I don't have to be in the store again any time soon. Better to spend an extra 5m grabbing everything for the next week than to come in again in two days time.
• Telemakhos 4y ago
  I used to shop on a daily basis. Lately, though, I cannot know that food I want will be available on a daily basis, so I buy in bulk when it is available. This week diet soda is not on the shelves, but at least jumbo eggs are, and that’s rare. I only have this problem on the west coast, so I suspect it’s a local distribution issue; I’m looking forward to moving back to the east coast, where groceries are more plentiful.
  • richiebful1 4y ago
    I haven't spent much time on the West Coast, but this surprises me. California is the real "Garden State" in terms of produce production. Can other people verify this or offer a theory why this would be the case?
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      Grass is greener on the other side? The bountiful produce production is mostly more noticeable in SoCal/central valley than in SF.
    • astrange 4y ago
      Groceries aren’t that good in NYC because they won’t allow enough warehouses to be built; IIRC this leads to produce being older and sometimes spoiled in stores. Other places on the east coast do have better groceries than NorCal and proximity to farms doesn’t seem to matter that much. Which makes sense; “eating local” and “farm to table” are not actually real things, wouldn’t be good for the environment if they were, and are mostly products of green meme boomers’ wishful thinking.
    • gkop 4y ago
      I live in the bay, we have fabulous and abundant groceries. Maybe other parts of the state are different.
  • randallsquared 4y ago
    Things randomly not being available really underwent a step change that hasn't been reversed in the period since 2020. The best solution to that which I found, in NYC, was to order as much as possible through Amazon Fresh (really Prime Now was better, but for whatever reason they killed it in favor of the worse version). The benefit of that is that it only takes a moment to check if things are in stock, and if they're not in stock, it just won't let me order them. If they are in stock, I bulk order (best example is, as you said, diet soda). Until I moved out of Manhattan recently, the absolute best shopping experience was Gorillas, which had the "not available in the app if it's not available in real life" experience of Fresh, but also delivery in near real-time. I have started meals, found that I was missing an ingredient, and ordered it through Gorillas with no disruption to the meal prep time.
• Markoff 4y ago
  that seems horribly inefficient considering wasted time on the way to/from shop and time spent in queue waiting at checkout, so instead of doing this 1-2x a week you spend like 3 times more time on these fixed items and let's ignore the promotions especially for bigger packages/bulk purchases I don't think it's really doable unless you are single and you have big chain right on the way from work, otherwise small shops in convenient location next to your house will charge you premium compared to big discount chains