My DH has no problem drinking diet soda in general but HATES the flavor of Diet Coke - he’s Coke Zero or bust. Apparently the two have very different flavor profiles, with Coke Zero tasting much more like regular Coke. Or so I’m told. I despise the flavor of cola no matter what sweetener is involved so I’ve not tasted any of the contenders in decades.
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Diet Coke tastes like Tab.
Coke Zero tastes like Diet Coke before Coke Zero was invented.
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Both diet coke and coke zero are pure vile.
I don’t drink coke often (1 glass a month maybe) but I’ll always just get regular, sugar-y coke!
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But, this is overgeneralising… 
I’m European and it really depends on criteria like city vs village vs suburb, income, quality of available food and so on. If your local Lidl has better and cheaper apples than your cutesy greengrocer, you bet Europeans will go to Lidl (and they do in droves).
Then there is online shopping. Our biggest supermarket chain is basically offering free delivery (if you buy one specific item that is on sale that week), and groceries will be brought into your kitchen (even if you live in an apartment three stories high).
Then there is me! Living in a city, I mostly do shopping once a week, on Saturday, at a wholesale shop for restaurants - probably very similar to American supermarkets. A lot of stuff in bulk, but also most importantly restaurant quality fresh fish and meat. It’s a 12 minute drive outside my city so I won’t be there every day. If I need somethign quick, eg fresh bread, I have a plethora of options within a 5 minute walk, as I live in a multicultural neighbourhood.
And then I’ll let my cooking instinct dictate what to eat, so a mixture of dry pantry items (lentils, rice), freezer stuff (meat) and then fresh veggies and proteins.
In contrast, our supermarkets are using marketing to lure consumers into their shops daily, by giving out specific recipes. Monday Mexican tacos, Tuesday hamburgers, Wednesday pasta carbonara and so on. They want people to come in every day so they sell more stuff…
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It was something that really grew during Covid and now all the major supermarkets have extensive shopping websites. We use it from time to time for the weekly shops - last time was before Christmas when we ordered all the heavy stuff - wine, bottled water, etc - for delivery.
The brother in law used to work as a delivery driver for one of the supermarkets. It’s an extensive operation. Customer orders would be picked and bagged at a central warehouse facility (somewhere in the English Midlands) and loaded into transport “troughs”. Then shipped to regional distribution centres where the troughs were reloaded onto the home delivery vans. All the BiL had to do was turn up, get in the van and start his shift. Was fine until one day he crashed the van and got sacked.
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I shop like a European when I’m in Toronto. When I’m in London, Ontario , a mid-sized 423 000 person city, I shop twice a week. I still shop a bit like a European in that I’m buying fresh fish on Fridays and fresh vegetables every time I shop. In Toronto, I live 3 blocks from my greengrocer and a 15 minute walk from my butcher in Kensington Market. I buy coffee from the local coffee shops.
I have started buying frozen seafood online this past month. I will still buy fresh halibut and fresh salmon from my local indie grocery store, but I will buy frozen lobster, frozen BC spot prawns and frozen snow crab online from now on.
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Agree with all of this, including the “living in Queens and doing all of my shopping at multiple stores I can walk to” part (Astoria for me). Here in my part of suburban CA, the only store I can walk to is my local Grocery Outlet, and I can’t get everything I need there. Also, when I go into the town next door where there are several shops within walking distance of each other, the “walking between stores” part isn’t practical because of the roads one would have to cross to do so.
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i tend to shop 4-5x per week for food items. that’s says a lot about my motivations, but also the privileged position of where i reside. the article made me curious … i used this tool to draw a 2 mile radius around my primary residence (www.atlist.com/radius-map-tool). i live in a city of approximately 50k people. in my immediate radius i can find:
10 grocery ‘super’ markets (i’m defining this as anything the size of a trader joes or larger)
5 grocers (smaller, specialized (e.g, Mexican, Pan-Asian, produce-only markets)
3 dedicated bakeries (some local bakeries supply many of the markets)
2 farmers markets (one midweek, on the weekend)
1 dedicated fish/seafood (excludes fish counters at markets)
1 dedicated cheese (excludes cheese counters at markets)
'=======================
22 Total
i suspect for millions upon millions, their number would be zero. urban planners have talked about mix-use dense housing and infrastructure in city planning for decades.
the concept has been championed in shorthand as ‘the 15 minute city’. see www.theguardian.com/cities/2024/apr/06/why-has-15-minute-city-taken-off-paris-toxic-idea-uk-carlos-moreno . it’s a pretty simple idea: develop towns to allow for inhabitants to access all their basic needs via a maximum 15 minutes of travel time (a short discussion here: 99percentinvisible.org/episode/605-15-minute-city/).
i never considered my shopping style ‘European’, but if it means i have a steady supply of fresh things, and near zero food waste, then i’ll happily accept that label.
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In context to the topic, this a good read. Fast facts: supermarkets have gone to 45,000 sf. Trader Joe’s averages 15,000 sf.
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An American football field is 57,600 square feet. I think the disorienting supermarket I went to a few weeks ago was even bigger than that.
Ah, by zooming in on the supermarket in Google Maps, I get 74,200 square feet.
ETA: For people not familiar with Freedom Units, the numbers are
Trader Joe’s: 1393.5 square metres
Average US supermarket: 4181 sqm
US football field: 5351 sqm
Lucky’s supermarket in El Cerrito, CA: 6893 sqm
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that was the world of our first visits to London and Scotland in the early 80s. We were thrilled to shop in the local daily bakeries and other shops but the EU rules and supermarket chains seem to have put paid to all of that over a relatively brief period.
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I’ve been to the El Cerrito Lucky store, it’s nuts, and it is disorienting because it keeps going. OTOH, if you track steps there that.
BTW, largest Costco is 235,000 square feet.
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I did feel disoriented, even dizzy, when I first started going to Costco.
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hi, which EU rules?
I’d also ask which EU rules you think have killed off small shops.
In recent months, our local fishmonger has closed. Reason was the landlord increased the rent on the premises. A similar fate almost hit the DiY and housewares shop in the village when the landlord demanded a 30% increase in the rent. In the event, they were able to move to smaller premises down the road but, of course, have had to scale back the range of stock they can keep.
I’d fully accept that, since we left the Union in 2020, it is much more complicated for British business to import from and export to the EU. That effects all goods not just foodstuffs. On a personal level, I used to buy zero alcohol wine from a company based in the Netherlands. It’s website was in English and priced in sterling. Delivery used to actually be quicker than a similar company in my metro area. Since we left the Union, that company no longer supplies to the UK market citing the fact that the costs of the newly required “paperwork” make it uneconomic.
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Sometimes I generalize out of too few data points. But we enjoyed fresh and deliciousbread eggs and milk and meats from small local shops (along with Indian food we brought in) when we stayed near Regents Park in say 1983, and in similar shops and bakeries in Cullen Scotland in the next 10-15 years,
In the case of London (staying in several different spots on subsequent visits) my impression was that the small corner stores mostly changed hands with less quality local product, while big supermarkets (some very good admittedly) filled most needs in central residential areas. In Scotland, the little produce store owner in Cullen sold wonderful cheeses when we first visited there which he would drive down to the Glasgow area to purchase on our first visit. The next time we went, he told us that the EU inspectors required that the cheeses be transported in a refrigerated van, which he could not afford, so the cheeses (including a beautiful blue sheep cheese) were no linger available in that community. Fortunately there were still local vendors of fish, etc, but most of the local shops except the SPAR disappeared after a large supermarket opened in the next town.
Can’t speak for Britain but there are still many independent shops/bakeries in Germany, France, Italy, Netherland, Denmark, Croatia etc. and even though the number has declined a bit (which has little to do with EU regulations) they are still reasonable doing quite well
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The two cheesemongers near to me seem to have no problem with stock. For example -
By the by, the EU doesnt have inspectors such as you mention. Anything of that sort would have come from the local council’s Environmental Health inspectors. Food hygiene issues are a matter for the nations of the UK, so always possible that Scotland is more restrictive than, say, England which, to the best of my knowledge, doesnt require cheese to be transported in refrigerated vans. I’ll try and remember to ask the two cheese producers at my local farmers market if I’m right.
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It could have been a local inspector enforcing EU rules - the shopkeeperccomplainede specifically about EU rules which were restrictive on raw milk cheeses and did not permit the cheese to be unrefrigeraterated for that much time - its a pretty long drive from Glasgow area to Speyside. I I would imagine distributors that would cover Manchester etc would not make it to this fairly lightly populated region . Most of the food we ate used Scottish products which were very good. We ate too many Walkers seconds from the factory in the area, etc. There are a lot of EU rules around cheese (with rulemaking driven by the large manufacturers) which have been hard on small cheesemakers throughot the zone. I dont know how much of this regulation has been retained in the UK (its hard work to address this). Whatever the situation, your cheese selection is much more routinely excellent in UK and Europe than in the US.
Thank you for this! Something we marvel about in Asheville after moving from Washington, DC, is how you can get pretty much anywhere you need to within 15 minutes.
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