When I was in college, after I moved out of the dorms, I didn’t have a car. I took the bus to the grocery store. One thing I did to make sure I didn’t buy too much to carry home from the bus stop was use a basket instead of a cart at the store. If it was too heavy to carry in the store, it was too heavy to carry home from the bus stop.
Wow, talk about separated by a common language! What does that mean?
Anyway, I live in an interesting part of Dallas that’s upper middle class homes interspersed with some very low income housing. It looks like many of the people do not have cars, since I see quite a few people hanging out at the bus stop with shopping bags, or walking to/from the Wal-Mart and the grocery stores nearby with the bags. I also used to see quite a few people on the light rail with shopping bags as well- apparently they’ll go pretty far afield to shop at a Target store, based on the lack of residential areas along that line in that direction for quite a distance.
I have one of those folding luggage carriers and a large canvas bag which fits nicely on it and holds about as much groceries as I can lift up into a bus. There’s one store about a twenty minute walk from my house (which I had shopped at this morning) and another that’s a short bus ride away. If necessary I’ll make two or three shopping trips a week; being retired I have the time and usually do my shopping when the buses aren’t full. Since the bus is free it doesn’t matter how many trips I make - I’ve sometimes made two trips in the same day.
The only things that I have trouble with are cat litter and when I take advantage of the buy 2 get 3 free sales that the Harris Teeter occasionally runs on juice. Occasionally I take advantage of the availability of a friend when I need to make bulky or heavy purchases, which she doesn’t mind doing because I usually pay when we go out to eat.
When my husband was stationed in Spain, I frequently walked to the train station in Torrejon, took the train to near the Air Force base, walked to base, stopped at the library to swap out books, stopped at the BX (base exchange, apparently the Air Force has to be different), then went grocery shopping. I had a duffel bag that I used to haul everything around. Then I walked to the hitchhiking station, and I could usually get a ride to the train station, at least, if not to Torrejon itself.
It was a lot of walking, but I was pretty much used to that much walking back then, as I used to hike all over the college grounds rather than try to drive my car from one end of the campus to the other. It was actually quicker to walk than to try to find a parking spot.
When I was 23 I lived alone in a city where my only means of transportation was a bicycle or the bus. It was sort of a pain in the ass, but I got pretty good at riding my bike with 4 or 5 plastic bags on my arms. If I had to buy something big, I either hauled it on the bus or just walked. If that wasn’t possible, I would have gotten a cab. Doesn’t seem like too hard of a situation to figure out.
Pretty much this, when I didn’t have a car. I used a large plastic shoulder bag to carry a lot of the groceries and just carried the rest of them in my hands. It was about a 1/2 mile walk to one large grocery store. I ended up walking a lot. Not a lot of fun in Houston heat, or in inclement weather.
It was unpleasant, and having a car makes life much better. Mass transit, at least in Houston or Austin, is not a reasonable equivalent to having a car.
One of the benefits of choosing to eat fresh foods is that you’re never buying huge amounts of canned or frozen goods, you just stop at the market on the way home and get what you need for a day or two. The shelf full of canned goods is the stuff for emergencies, not regular eating.
Our bike paniers can carry about two bags of groceries each. If we both go shopping that means we’re bringing back 8 bags of groceries (more if we strap something to the top of our rack).
But usually it’s as above: on the way home form work, we do a quick stop and get the things we plan on eating withing three days. There’s usually tons of room left over for other sundry items.
I live in urban London. In walking distance of my home I have a medium sized supermarket open 24 hours plus various small grocery stores for small shops. Every few weeks I will do a large shop using an online service. All the major supermarkets have them, then there are specialist online-only retailers such as Ocado.com – with these you can specify the delivery times to within an hour, and they deliver late and on Sundays, so being at work during the week isn’t a problem.
I do miss doing long lazy shops at big supermarkets though.
I take the local bus and buy only as much as I can carry. I don’t have family, though; it’s just me.
I did the markets/little local shop route, and really should shop at them more now.
Incidently, a few of the local supermarkets here in the UK are getting wise and putting on free buses to their shops. I think it runs 2 or 3 times daily weekdays and saturdays each way, pick up only on one direction, drop off only on the other, taking a meandering route through the poorer suburbs. Not caught it, but been stuck behind once or twice.
Everytime I’ve lived somewhere without a car, I was walking distance to a supermarket. So it wasn’t a big deal.
My nearest grocery is about a mile from my house. I go about twice a week and get just enough for a few days. Every once in a while, I’ll go every day and stock up on things I eat a lot of that don’t weigh too much.
I just carry a tote on one arm and a bag in the other.
Dole bludgers - people who are long-term unemployment benefit recipients, who game the system to keep receiving their benefits instead of, you know, working.
Pension - any government payment. Usually a pension is more referring to one that’s provided for someone who can’t work (disability pension, old age pension, sole parent pension), but is a shortcut term for any of the payments.
Woody & Coke - Premixed cans of Woodstock Bourbon & Cola. Cheap and nasty, probably one of the cheapest drinks available from a standard liquor store. Drink of choice for people in lower socio-economic areas.
I was ill for a few months back in 2005 and couldn’t walk or drive. One of the supermarket chains here in Tucson had online shopping. I could order what I needed on their website and pay for it with my debit card and have it delivered within about a 90 minute delivery window. There was a $9.95 or so delivery charge, but I didn’t mind, as since I wasn’t driving, I wasn’t using my own gas, so that offset the cost. It was literally a lifesaver. They’ve since discontinued their online shopping, they’ve had financial woes recently, but Safeway offers the same thing here.
Actually the grocery store was no problem. The electronics shop–whoee, that was a problem.
First, I got there on my bicycle, and found the perfect system, no component of which was small enough for me to carry home on my bike. It wasn’t so much heavy as unwieldy. This was about a 30-minute bus ride from my humble abode.
So I put my money down, rode the bike home, took the bus back, and got a box containing something–probably the tuner. I still had to walk a few blocks from the bus, and change busses, so I didn’t want something that would be impossible to carry and that I might drop.
Then I went back for one speaker.
About this time a friend of mine asked me to do something and I said “Can’t, I’m making multiple trips to the shopping center to get my stereo working…” so he offered to give me a ride for the rest of it.
But…he had a TR4…so once we got the rest of it in his car, there was no room for another person, so I had to take the bus back again anyway.
But a grocery store? Where you don’t really have to get anything big, and it’s only five blocks away? Luxury!
When I lived in the UK I tended to walk to the shops and take a bus back with a week’s worth.
Here in Australia Boy From Mars has a car but I don’t; we live around 5 minutes walk from a small village so I will walk there usually with a trolley or the pram, fill the underbasket and walk back. When I feel like some exercise I walk to another suburb around 30 min away with the pram and walk back. Otherwise there’s a supermarket a few minutes from my work; if I get a chance I pop out during the day and get things for dinner and carry it back home on the train.
I have never had a car. The furthest I’ve lived from shopping is a half mile. It’s no biggie- I just take a backpack once or twice a week and call it my daily workout. I think it’s pretty healthy practice- fresh food is easy to stuff in a backpack. But those bulky bags of chips and boxes of cookies and the two liters and six packs are rarely worth hauling home.
We got rid of our car several years ago.
We have several methods of obtaining groceries:
[ul]
[li]Bi-weekly deliveries from an organic vegetable company, which includes coffee beans and eggs[/li][li]I stop a couple times a week at a supermarket which is located conveniently in the square where I change trains on the way home from work. These trips are generally for things we run out of frequently, like milk, bread, salad greens.[/li][li]Stock up on heavy stuff and non-perishables about every 6-8 weeks via delivery from a local supermarket chain. I used to use Peapod but they were unkind to my purchases, and had surly unkempt delivery people, so I was so happy when a supermarket I like started delivering to my neighborhood (Roche Bros, for you Boston area people). Miracle of miracles frozen things arrive frozen, cold things arrive cold, and room temp things arrive room temp. And the drivers are friendly. I think I have had the same 2 drivers for 6 years. They know me.[/li][li]I can walk to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s for picking up weekend produce and cheese (WF) and stock up on nuts, dried fruits and cereal (TJ). A small backpack and tote bag are sufficient for these trips.[/li][li]Monthly pickups at the farmer’s market of organic, humanely raised happy-animal meat, commercially frozen so we don’t have to eat all 10 pounds the first day.[/li][li]During the summer we can stop at a variety of urban farmers markets to get hyper-local in season things like tomatoes, strawberries, etc[/li][li]We also have a small garden in our yard which keeps us supplied with salad greens all summer and tomatoes and peppers in the fall.[/li][/ul]
ETA: We occasionally get a Zipcar for Home Depot trips and the like, and will sometimes combine a supermarket trip with another trip, for heavy things like cat litter and canned goods, but this only happens every couple of months.
I should add - it’s just me and the husband and the cat, but if we had children I think this would still be a viable way to shop. The grocery deliveries would probably be more frequent, though, and once the kids got old enough I’d do what my mom did and send them to the store to restock bread & milk rather than go myself.
You’re making the rookie mistake of thinking that modern children are allowed to go further than 20 feet away from their parents. 