General Suburban Updates and Rumours

[Acitta]

You don't need to go to 10 different stores in one day. The ones I listened each individually have a good variety of types of products.

Stop being so CarBrained™ and thinking that the only way to get groceries is to take your SUV once a month to a ginormous Zehrs and fill the back end with $500 worth of stuff.

People the world over have panniers or baskets on their bikes, and two of those reusable grocery bags (one per pannier or both in the basket) can hold a lot of food. Stop at one store on your way home on Wednesday and in 10-15 minutes you can easily fill those two bags with enough of the basics to feed two people for more than a week. It doesn't take very much planning to the point that it becomes second nature to get eggs and fresh veggies this week, 2x2L milk and fruits next week, and meat and a medium bag of potatoes every 4th week.

I loosely agree in theory (ie: this works great for an individual or for two adults), but also I recognize that most of our stores reward you for buying in bulk across most products. It's significantly cheaper for me to buy the giant box of Pampers instead of the small, easy-to-transport one. Like, 24 cents per diaper instead of 41 cents apiece. And when you're trying to make ends meet, and your kid goes through 8 diapers a day, most people can't justify buying the smaller amount for more money, knowing they're going to burn through the product that much faster and be spending more money for the privilege. If costs were equal across all sizes, then sure, I probably would buy smaller amounts of things to just get me through to the next week, but that's just not our reality. All I'm saying is, it's easy to say "Just stop at the store on your way home," but there is a world of reasons why it's not so simple - maybe you live or work in a grocery desert where there is no grocery store on the way home.

(I say all this as someone who does groceries on a weekly basis for a family of 3, where we walk to the Kitchener market to stock up on meats/cheese/fruits/veggies and absolutely load up the underneath of a stroller with our purchases, and still need to make a separate trip to the grocery store for a second, equally-sized load.)

There are people in this city with children who do their grocery shopping with an ebike, so it is possible to make that choice. Of course, the more we design the city around active transport, the more it will be enticing for people to choose that lifestyle.