You really should have visited American suburbia before posting that. American zoning is too strict and, due to a sprawl of single-family homes, population numb

You really should have visited American suburbia before posting that. American zoning is too strict and, due to a sprawl of single-family homes, population numbers too low to permit shops in many suburbs. Once has to leave the maze of residential roads and get onto a main thoroughfare before one will find a convenience store or, often more likely, a petrol station with a shop. And that is too long a distance to reasonably walk even for avid walkers. And if you write "independent shops", that is no longer true of even many European countries. While people do have a nearby shop, it might be typically from a chain (R-Kioski in Finland is essentially a monopoly, Żabka in Poland is omnipresent). The situation of, say, Spain, with its Chinese and Pakistani-owned independent shops, or Romania with its local family-owned shops does not extend over the whole EU.