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The closest grocery store is 1.5 hour walk. I’m not doing that in a Canadian winter or with hands full of groceries. And no, it’s not bikeable 5 months a year.
Also, I’ve bought four cars in my lifetime. I spent a combined $13,000 on them. My first car was $1400 and I still have it.
ehm Canadian winter will make sure the food does not spoil on the way ☺️
This sounds like a guy who is upset that he cannot afford a car so he comes up with reasons why its bad to own one and better to be in his position but due to lack of car owner experience just fucks the numbers all up and then looks stupid.
This sounds like a guy who is upset that he doesn’t live in a walkable city so he comes up reasons why it’s bad to live in one but due to lack of walkability experience just fucks the arguments and then looks stupid.
some people don’t like having overpriced housing costs that don’t include even a quarter acer of land
I don’t think there’s a significant correlation between walkable cities and higher real estate prices. There are plenty of unwalkable cities with high real estate prices and vice versa. That’s more a product of a large number of factors, from average income to density to quality of education and beyond. Walkability could be one of those, but I am doubtful it is a primary one, at least in the US.
Rent is 300/mo/2bd here. 2 grociers and a market are 5 minutes by bike. You can park within a few feet of your destination because of how dense parking bikes is. This is the 6th city I’ve stayed in where this is true, more if you’re a little looser with the requirements.
Doesn’t sound like that at all. Ridiculous that there are people who think a car is a necessity. It might be a necessity in most of the US, you can thank car manufacturer for that. I’m fine using my feet, bicycle or train. If I need a car I’ll borrow or rent one.
They’ve clearly never shopped at Costco. I can’t get out of there without dropping at least $200. Because, you don’t know you need a package of 50 AAA batteries, a gallon of mustard, 300 allergy pills, and a dozen rolls of Christmas wrapping paper until you’re there. Inside Costco that just makes sense.
And a gigantic box of frozen spanakopita, every time
That’s our go-to lazy Sunday breakfast.
It would be so nice to live somewhere I could walk to the store. Or anywhere.
Sounds so… Odd to me.
My entire life I’ve lived in a very dense city. Everywhere I look are stores, people, traffic. There’s never a single moment of silence, not even at night.
I low-key feel jealous to people who live in a quiet place…
The non-American mind cannot conceive of living in a place so vast.
More like living in a place where it can be impossible to cross a short distance on foot when it wouldn’t be impossible to add a walking path.
Europe is relatively small but their towns are waaay more compact because they were built before cars came around so most towns are already in favor of walking/biking distances.
But yeah America is huuuge. The drive from Paris to central Switzerland is about 12 and a half hours and it’s a total change of scenery. For the US that’s just California to Utah. Or Washington DC to Charleston SC.
What the US needs badly is high speed rail from city to city
In, roughly, 12 hours I can get from pennsylvania to florida. DC to Charleston should not take that long.
- I actually looked up my last trip from where I used to live. it was 14 hours and 12 minutes. So a little over 12, but point still stands.
I mean we do need that, but that has nothing to do with the problem. the majority of people don’t live in those vast expanses of nothingness. Most of our cities are just as populated as most European cities, we just have shit laws around zoning, single family housing, population density, NIMBYs blocking any change, and people that think public transit is for poor people. They don’t travel to other countries and so have no clue how good things could actually be.
we just have shit laws around zoning
Yeah above all else I think that is the biggest issue. There are daft rules about the size of carparks that mean that, what would be a local store in the EU, becomes this vast strip mall in the US with 12 acres of parking lot to walk across so you can get your milk.
You practically need a car to just drive across the vast expanses of car infrastructure. Crossing the road in the US is something you have to plan your day around
Yeah, it’s a shithole country which is why I got rid of my car, let my driver’s license expire, and left the country. Looking back, it was pretty prescient considering how fascism-y it has gotten there.
Yeah but you did just describe massive changes in scenery in America. You can do 12 hours of the same here for sure, the great plains are really big, but usually 12 hours of driving later the scenery has changed. It’s 14 hours from Duluth Minnesota which is on Lake Superior to Sundance Wyoming which has the devil’s tower monument and is past the great long stretches of nothing that makes up the bulk of the Dakotas. Des Moines is a city surrounded by nothing but corn and open road (with a distinct feel from the Dakotas) and is 12 hours from Memphis Tennessee which is adjacent to Appalachia. Baltimore Maryland, a coastal city on the Chesapeake Bay and near a bunch of swamps driving 12 hours west and north can get you into and out of the Appalachian Mountains (and not a short cut of them), barely dodging Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Toledo (with an optional roller coaster detour at Sandusky) while you hug Lake Erie, do the entire border of Michigan and Indiana before landing in Michigan City, Indiana on Lake Michigan, which looks like it’s just outside Chicagoland.
And out of curiosity I checked what a cross country trip looks like, NYC to Los Angeles is 50 hours, while the longest road trip between frequent destinations is Key West to Seattle at 63 hours. The latter of these begins on a tropical island, goes through swamps, deep south agricultural areas, Appalachia, Midwestern agriculture, the Mississippi River, Midwest agriculture, great plains, badlands, Rockies, pnw valleys, cascade mountains, and ends in a rainy ass wetlands, but this one has wild disparity between day length over the year.
Who’s putting $200 of gas in their car per month, what you doing driving the Route 66 on a weekly basis? The shops all of 5 miles away if it’s that.
Average US driving distance is about 14k miles per year, or about 1200/month. At 30 mpg, you need 40 gal per month. Current price per gal in the US (according to AAA) is $3.193/gal, which gets us $130/month in gas.
Wouldn’t have to be crazy above average to get to $200/month. Or have a car with kinda bad fuel efficiency.
If your commute is about an hour each way you’re probably spending roughly that much.
Not having a car wouldn’t be an option then.
Trains exist
Places that are nowhere near a train also exist.
That’s completely dependent on where you live. The closest train station to me is an hour and fifteen minutes walk from me.
I did when I had a really shitty commute for about a year and a half. Crazy thing is it wasn’t even that bad compared to some of my coworkers there.
Where in the world can you buy a week’s groceries for $50?
This week’s groceries for my family of 4 was only like $70. For a single person who’s not buying microwave ready meals, that’s easily doable.
Where do you live? Where I live, $70 is one week of frugal meals for a single 20-50 year old male. A family of four is $230 a week, per the USDA.
https://fns-prod.azureedge.us/sites/default/files/resource-files/cnpp-costFood-tfp-july2025.pdf
Midwest
If you are extremely frugal everywhere, even the US
Usually I manage $40-$67 (£30-£50) in the UK - usually it depends on if I need bonus things that aren’t weekly (cleaning supplies etc) :)
edit: this is for just two people though :)
1970ish?
Yes, we were all buying $300k cars in 1970.
I reckon I could do it for one person, but I’d have to cut down on bacon.
But it depends on where you live.
in my country if you ignore meat its almost that
Depends on how many people live in your household and what you eat. You can probably spend even less if you’re only cooking for one and most meals are ‘beans and rice’-level.
I’d assume that the hard part is finding an affordable place in a somewhat walkable neighborhood in the US, especially if you don’t want to live in a one-room apartment.
Either way, the $50 are really not the important part. It would still be true if you paid $200 and could save $50 by shopping at cheaper supermarkets that are further away.
Also if you are walking to the store, you are limiting the amount you can buy as you have to transport it back home. I have a nice little collapsible cart I use. Even that fills up and gets heavy once you are adding beverages.
Adding beverages is wasting money anyway, just drink water
REMEMBER THE ONLY WAY TO BE FRUGAL IS TO NEVER DO ANYTHING THAT BRINGS YOU PLEASURE, OR EAT ANYTHING BUT BEANS/RICE AND DRINK ONLY WATER.
This is what people who say shit like that sound to folks who know that life is not meant to just be survived, but enjoyed.
The stuff from the toilet??
That shit’s got electrolytes.
Lol ok buddy
True, you’re definitely missing out on a lot of bulk items, especially when you’re living in a smaller apartment and don’t even have the space to store 10 pound bags. And you pretty much have to go to the store multiple times a week.
I never thought about it like that! I did in fact buy the car specifically to go to the grocery store and don’t use it for anything else
Can’t you just order groceries? Isn’t that a thing in the US?
Have you considered renting? Depending on the business model, that could be very cheap if it’s just a couple of hours per week.
Renting a car? Oh… You mean like, subscribing? The type of payment model where the consumer always ends up overpaying when needing to use the service for extended periods of time?
Car2go was such an awesome service. I missed it very much when it went…I don’t know, where did it go?
Where I live, the concept is called “car sharing”. There are two small cars just across the street and if I need one, it costs 2,50 € per hour plus maybe 0,30 € per kilometer, fuel included. So if I need to make a weekly grocery run to one of the large stores, it’s probably just a little over 10-12 Euros for three hours all told.
Now, I own a car that’s older and too cheap to not keep it for longer drives when I am seeing my family (roughly an hour each way) at the weekends, but for my day-to-day needs, I probably shouldn’t own one.
That’s only a subscription if you keep the car 24/7, it’s a completely different thing if you only rent for a couple of hours per week. Even renting a car for a day (which might be the shortest amount of time you can rent a car in many places) wouldn’t be a subscription, though at that point it might not be cheaper than owning anymore.
The car rental place is further away from me than the grocery store.
Or instacart.
Anon is far too stupid to be trusted with a car
Spending only $50 a week on groceries, I dont expect Anon will live very long due to malnourishment.
Wait, what’s your weekly grocery bill just for you?
I am in California, so it’s usually more than $90 each week if I don’t get fast food for any meal.
Ah, rough. Groceries can be wildly expensive.
Sadly yes. And they just get more expensive every year. Too bad wages have stayed the same since like, 2001.
Man, y’all really have no clue about other countries do you.
Other countries have transit systems, they don’t have to buy a car to get to Costco, this is obviously written by a stupid american about the US
