Just for a bit of comparison... I'm in the UK and don't drive. It is a 10-min walk to a big Tesco superstore, which is really convenient. It is on my commute too (which I also walk, Uber if its raining heavily).
It's not inherently an American thing, it's the result of several mid-century zoning and urban design decisions.
I used to live in a 1920s era "streetcar suburb" neighbourhood. I lived on the third floor, and the ground level was a full (but small) grocery store. I never spent more than ~$50 at a time on groceries because I only bought for a couple days at a time.
The same decisions and laws that created the current system can be changed to take us back to the "norm" in the rest of the world.
People have a lot of hyperbole about grocery store density. Pull up a random city and see how they are actually distributed. Even in flyover state metros grocery stores are basically evenly distributed 1-3 miles apart from the next across the entire urbanized/suburbanized area.
> If people were legally allowed to live near grocery stores
What are you talking about? What backwaters country is this? In many places in the world, people live literally on top of grocery stores, such law would be ridiculed until the law makers have to socially isolate themselves if they tried to come up with something so stupid.
The great majority of development in American cities over the last 75 years has been single-use, with neighborhoods of exclusively single-family houses separated from nearby commercial strips with big parking lots along wide roads.
The downtown/center of older cities may still have mixed use, and there have been changes happening in recent years to allow/build more apartments and mixed use areas, but, generally outside of the densest parts of the largest cities commercial and residential areas are required to be separate, with personal cars as the primary/only way to get between them.
This has been a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon, IMO, as car-first infrastructure puts people at the mercy of traffic congestion, and means that any apartment building or business in their vicinity will result in more cars passing through, more congestion, more competition for parking, as well as the presence of the large parking lots that cities mandate for any new construction, which themselves make it unpleasant to get around in any other way.
> the median distance to the nearest food store for the overall U.S. population was 0.9 miles, with 40 percent of the U.S. population living more than 1 mile from a food store. The median distance to the third-nearest food store for the overall population was 1.7 miles. When the ERS researchers looked at rural food store access, they found that the median distance to the nearest and the third-nearest food store was 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.
In older areas, some. But practically anything after WW2, not nearly as much.
It's somewhat misleading to talk about distance-to-X in a lot of American places. I live less than a mile from the nearest grocery as the crow flies, but if I wanted to walk there I have to traverse my entire street to get to an exit road (as opposed to walking out my back gate; the whole back is fenced because the exit road is directly behind my house). Then I have to walk down a fairly busy one-lane-each-way road with no sidewalks or shoulders present (i.e., you're going to be walking in a shallow drainage ditch - hope it's not raining!) for a few hundred meters, cross two busy multilane roads, and walk across an unshaded parking lot.
The US, which is where Phoenix is. And yes, my point is that we (in the US) should have walkable (and bikeable) cities, like much of the rest of the world.
I wouldn't want any elderly person I knew walking that distance in any of the 3 weeks Phoenix typically spends over 100 degrees (even hotter over pavement).
They are talking about US suburbs. For example, the house I grew up in is over a mile to the nearest grocery and you have to cross two large intersections on the way.
The intersection stuff sucks, but "over a mile" seems to be between 1.5 to 2km, is that considered far to walk in the US? Measuring where I go to have my morning coffee at a cafe each day, it seems to be 1.3km away, and I walk there and back every morning...
Go to Google Maps, drop the StreeView person anywhere in the US 10 times and count how many times you find yourself in a place where you would be happy to be walking right now. Try and look for sidewalks and pedestrian crossings. It's hard to understand the layout of American cities for the European and Asian mind.
I've been to the US many times and I'm still shocked when I need to drive from this parking lot to that parking lot across the street because it would be dangerous and possibly illegal to just walk there.
Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop? Also, walking places in US suburbs is a miserable experience, especially in the Southwest where it gets hot. Everything is spread out with large parking lots, sidewalks are a maybe, the roads are busy and there is no shade or sound dampening.
> Are you carrying your groceries to the coffee shop?
Obviously no. But where I lived ~20 years ago the nearest grocery was a 20 minute walk there and then 20 minute walk back with two or four shopping bags with stuff, and I wasn't the only one walking there when needing to do shopping.
I think it's more common than not out in the world that things are far away so you need to spend awful amount of time on just getting places. Unless you live in a city of course.
My grocery store is 3 miles (~5km) away with nearly zero sidewalks, and I live in the capital city of my state. America is a hellscape in that respect.
Counterpoint: my family in New Delhi regularly gets groceries (and booze and cigarettes and pet food) delivered. Convenience comes in many forms, and not everyone values the same elements similarly.
