Grocery shopping in America vs. Europe
The hidden cost of over-abundance.
You don’t need it, but if you want it, you should be able to buy it, right?
Despite documented evidence of the burden of choice1, such seems to be the ethos of American capitalism. Aren’t options the hallmark of a life of comfort, and thus the ultimate measure of success? I’m not talking about actual needs here, but rather wants. Conveniences. Innumerable options. Don’t get me wrong, I like options. But how many is “too many” versus “just enough”?
While Europe is very much capitalist as well, it seems to have struck a different balance. It is a reminder that the American way is not the only way (nor necessarily the default) and bigger isn’t always better.
What will we miss about America?
A few weeks ago, as we sipped coffee on the porch of a duplex bungalow in Death Valley, California, I asked my husband:
“What do you think we’ll miss about living in the U.S.?”
“Other than my family? I’m not sure… Maybe the ability to order everything online and have it delivered in the next day or two,” he mused. Included among our many similarities is a particular dislike of malls and their parking lots, hence our online shopping tendencies.
“I’ll miss the garbage disposal,” I replied.
For those of you who do not live in the U.S., our kitchen sinks are equipped with a sort of blender, right under the drain hole. You can dump soft food scraps like a few grains of rice or soggy cereal in there, let the water run, press a button, and it’s gone. Pouf! Flushed out of existence. No need to take the icky drain filter and empty it out every time. If you’re someone who gets grossed out pretty easily, there’s no going back once you’ve met the garbage disposal. Or is there?
Our American life in California was full of conveniences and choices that people of our tax bracket can become very attached to, myself included. I’ve tasted wines from all over the world without having to leave my bat-girl cave. But at what cost do we idealize such instant and constant reward? Do I really need that same day delivery? Is life really better/easier when I can choose among thousands of vendors for a USB cable, vetting their reviews before committing my dollars?
We’re now three weeks into our summer trip in Europe and one thing I love about European cities is how walkable they are. Part of the reason for that is because the stores generally have very small footprints, which means a smaller selection of everything. At first, I thought a smaller selection would feel limiting, but increasingly, I’m noticing that a few very good options might be better than so very many options of vastly varying desirability.
Frankfurt
For the first week, we stayed at an apartment hotel in Frankfurt. We hate having to figure out what to have for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day when we’re at a hotel, so we try to have a kitchenette for extended stays. That way we can at least make eggs in the morning, or cook a simple meal at home when we’re too tired to wade through endless restaurant listings trying to decide what to eat. We’re also rather picky when it comes to sugar and sodium content so cooking is often the easiest and most satisfying. I can whip up dinner in under 30 mins.
On the flip side, apart-hotels mean that, as soon as you arrive, it’s time to search for food. I had barely made it to the crosswalk at the end of the block when I noticed the entrance to what looked like a shopping centre. Remember, I’m not a fan of malls, but I saw on the map that this one had a grocery store. It was getting late and rather chilly so my aversion for crowded, echoey malls had to be put aside for the moment. This complex though, was very compact. Mostly just two floors in an oval-ish shape and each store with a relatively small footprint. It took me less than two minutes to search my way to the grocery store in the middle of it! In California it would take me at least 5-10 minutes just to park the car, then probably another 5 minutes to walk to the desired outlet, if I knew where I was going — which I usually don’t because malls are often designed to confuse you (it’s called the Gruen transfer).
Once at the Rewe supermarket, I was reminded of the supermarkets in Mauritius (not to be confused with the hypermarkets, which look more like the U.S. grocery stores). The store is the size of a larger 7-Eleven maybe. The aisles are small and compact. There’s no grocery cart, only hand baskets. You don’t have 27 types of olive oil, you have maybe two or three. Yet the one I pick, sourced from Italy, is some of the best olive oil we’ve ever had. We also tried some German wines, specifically the Grauer Burgunder (Pinot Grigio). They averaged about $6 and they were quite good!
It did take me at least three days to find the eggs, but that’s because they were nestled on a tiny shelf at the end of an aisle, not in the refrigerated dairy section like in the U.S. What amazed me is that this little supermarket had nearly everything, including Asian condiments. They just stock smaller quantities and fewer brands of a product.
London
We were so tired when we arrived in Frankfurt that seven days felt like three and soon it was time to take the train to London via Paris. Our next stop was Canary Wharf, London. Barely a stone’s throw away, there was a Tesco Express, and a Tian Tian (Asian market). Both were again small stores but had all the essentials. I got some lychees, Chinese greens, pandan cake, sesame oil and soy sauce from the latter. Tesco had pre-packaged fish, chicken, and fresh produce, as well as most household essentials. And wine of course. It was so easy to get what we need just across the street. We tried some excellent Italian, French, Australian and South African wines. I’m kind of surprised that there aren’t any British wines. Over the next ten days, we only ate out a handful of times, one of which was to gain access to a hotel’s internet when ours was down. Perhaps some other time I can make a post about or accommodation misadventures :-)
Rennes
We are currently renting a small house in Rennes, France. We arrived a few days ago around 5:30pm after a 20 minute taxi ride from the airport. While my husband hopped into the shower, I decided to go find us some food. Around the block from our place, across a narrow pedestrian bridge, I emerged on this charming street lined with small shops.
First, I stopped by a produce stall where the young lady weighed and rang up vegetables, fruits and eggs as I struggled to recall correct French grammar and vocabulary to tell her what I’d like to buy. Unlike in a regular grocery store, at a produce stall, you typically ask for what you want, then they weigh it and give it to you. I had forgotten how that works and my French felt noticeably rusty as I fumbled my way around this transaction. Still, in about five minutes, I had bought all the produce I needed for the night and the following morning.
Heading out, I noticed a “poissonnerie” across the street. We wanted to have fish for dinner—perfect! It was the end of the day so there wasn’t much left, but the young man eagerly showed me some of the fillets he had in stock and I got a large piece to have for dinner and leftovers. I asked him if he knew where the fish was caught and he pointed out the region on the Atlantic side of France on a map hanging on the wall. “Pêche Française” he assured me. It was fished in France. I had never heard of the fish, and I wish I could remember its name. It was delicious. I’d say it was like a cross between halibut and Chilean seabass (which is neither a sea bass, nor Chilean by the way).
Barely a few minutes had gone by as I stepped out of the fish store and into the wine store two doors down. There, a friendly gentleman asked if I needed any help. Did he stock any local wines, I inquired. He said the Loire Valley would be the closest region and offered some suggestions for whites that would go with the fish. I picked a dry sauvignon blanc, thanked him and wished him a pleasant evening. It’s funny how even these quotidian greetings felt a little foreign to me now. I have not lived in a francophone environment for close to 20 years and I guess it shows.
Coming out of the wine store, I couldn’t help but notice “Les Italiens du Coin” (the corner Italians). I thought pasta might be good with the fish, plus I probably needed some olive oil to cook with. So in I went, where I was greeted by 6 differently infused olive oils, but all in travel-size bottles: pistachio, basil, pesto, chili, lemon, orange. All very tempting. As I checked the labels for the pasta sauces on display for salt content, I settled on a jar of pesto, and the pesto-infused oil (which has no salt) so we can get all the flavor without too much sodium. They had freshly made pasta as well, so I decided to get some tagliatelle. Given my seemingly endless deliberation over which sauce and oil to get, I’d say I spent maybe seven minutes at the store. Though this exchange also felt a little gauche as I mentally grasped for words, it did help that my interlocutors probably also spoke French as a second language.
I thought about hitting up the cheese store, but my load was getting heavy and I knew it would take me a lot longer to pick a cheese than I do on a typical grocery run. This is France after all and I’m the American who typically buys “four-cheese shredded Italian mix” or “shredded Mexican” from the cheese section. I’ll save the embarrassment for another day.
California versus Rennes grocery shopping
Five minutes later, I was home, thrilled! My husband asked how it went.
“I love this place,” I exclaimed, as I recounted my little shopping excursion.
I was gone barely half an hour and had shopped at four specialty stores.
Back in California, it would take me 12 minutes to drive to Sprouts, where it would take me about half an hour to get groceries. In the time it generally took me to walk from the grocery store entrance to my car if it was parked in the furthest spot on a busy day, I could get to this cute little street in Rennes on foot and buy a croissant.
The total errand time would be close to an hour door to door, if it’s a small run. A weekly run would be well over an hour. And because of that, I tended to do the grocery shopping for the entire week. For that, I needed a shopping list, lest I forget anything. If I find myself staring at mushrooms, unsure whether we still have any at home? Guess what, I’m buying them because the last thing I want to do is go back out again. This often resulted in a scramble to use everything up on time, and sometimes, in food waste.
Grocery shopping in the U.S. is a much less spontaneous effort and requires an optimization algorithm that we probably all subconsciously have running. Here, where everything is just a few minutes away on foot, I don’t have to plan ahead so much. It’s incredible how much mental space that actually frees up.
Then there’s the time involved in just driving to everything.
If I were to go to four different stores in California (like I did here) instead of shop at Sprouts, that’s an all day endeavor. The fresh fish place we went to (WildLocal Seafood) was a 30 min drive away, in Ventura — if traffic was smooth. If I wanted to go to a wine store, Total Wines has nearly any wine you can imagine from all over the world, and was about a 15 min drive away. I never came across a fresh pasta/Italian specialty place in the suburbs but assuming there was one, it would probably be at least 15 mins away. At each of those locations, you have to factor in parking time, and getting from your car to the store entrance, since they’re usually in strip malls with shared parking lots and cars zooming past in every direction. Just thinking about getting in the car, driving, parking the car, getting out of the parking lot for each of these exhausts me. Then, of course, you have to get a cart, and return the carts. It all adds up, minute by minute. Even if they were all in the same strip mall, the stores in California can be very large and spread out around a massive parking lot.
Here, there’s barely any street parking at all, let alone retail parking lots, so everybody seemingly walks or bikes or takes public transit. Since all the stores are close by, you can do multiple trips a day, no sweat. I went out four times yesterday: once to get bread and croissants for breakfast, once to get lunch, once to get groceries for dinner, and one more run to get some wine and chocolate. Four trips would be way too ambitious for one day in California, but in European cities where the stores are tiny, packed together, and only a few minutes’ walk away, it doesn’t feel like much. Instead of sitting in my car and grumbling at the requisite double-parked monster SUVs in yet another strip mall parking lot, I’m exercising while shopping, and only buying what I need for a day or two, instead of the whole week.
Public health implications of more efficient shopping
If you’re COVID-cautious like us, you might be thinking - what about during a pandemic? Wouldn’t having to shop more frequently increase risks of infections, especially pre-vaccines?
It’s an excellent question I do not have the answer to, but I do wonder if there’s any data that compared how long you end up spending shopping indoors in large stores in the U.S., versus shopping very efficiently in small stores (with doors open) in Europe, and which of these ended up with a higher rate of disease transmission.
An alternative hypothesis could be that the more efficient shopping, and fewer customers overlapping, would actually reduce infections from retail stores.
This Danish paper showed that Danish customers who made purchases at the same store within 5 mins of an infected person doing so were somewhat likely to get infected, and that casual interactions at retail stores was a non-negligible source of infections.
Here, I’m in each store for barely a few minutes at a time, and there’s rarely more than one or two other customers at the same time, while in the U.S. I would have generally been in the store longer, with more people doing the same around me. I wouldn’t be surprised if shopping here was safer.
If you know of any research proving or disproving my hypothesis, please post them in the comments!
When is it “just enough”?
When you first come to Europe from the U.S., you’re struck by how tiny the fridges and kitchens are. But once you live a few weeks here, you can see how it can work (though I admit I still would love a big kitchen). If you’re only buying groceries for a day or two, you don’t need that much space in the fridge, let alone a sub-zero model that can fit a miniature horse! Just buy fresh stuff the next day, once you’ve used it up. There’s neither space nor reason to hoard. Perhaps less food waste as a result, too.
In any of these stores, choices are limited. I couldn’t choose between olive oil sourced from 100% California orchards, or Spain or Italy Greece or a blend. I couldn’t get wine from any region in the world at almost any price point. I couldn’t choose between 20 different shapes of pasta. But I got what I needed, it was good quality, and I got it very efficiently. Everything was delicious too. I was not looking for Asian spices that night, so maybe I would have had a harder time with that but I did see an organic épicerie (spice store) on my walk yesterday that looked promising. Plus, I brought some of my own, obviously. One never wants to be stranded without spices on a nomadic journey.
Europeans don’t suffer from American-style consumerism
The small to tiny cars lining the streets remind me that it’s not actually the norm to see monster trucks, gigantic SUVs or 40-foot Amazon trailer trucks everywhere. It’s refreshing to see more normal-sized vehicles again. Bigger isn’t always better. In fact, when it comes to vehicles, bigger is often more dangerous. To pedestrians at least.
More choices doesn’t automatically lead to better choices. Sometimes, it leads to poorer and more frustrating ones. We don’t realize what we sacrifice for the availability of innumerable choices. Time spent driving, comparing, reading reviews. Real estate on shelves to display them all, aisles wide enough for two-way cart traffic, fifteen checkout lines, and of course gigantic parking lots. The mental energy spent on trying to make the absolute best possible choice and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
This waste is compounded by planned obsolescence and great marketing of the latest product releases. As I walk the narrow streets of Europe, I can’t help but notice that the cars aren’t just smaller, they’re also older. Perhaps one does not need to change vehicles every 5 years. Who enjoys the process of shopping for cars anyway?
By opting for bigger stores with everything you could possibly want on sale, including the kitchen sink, and gigantic parking lots to match, we give up walkability, public transit access, and with that, better health outcomes as we become car-centric societies.
Interacting with merchants
I could feel my brain’s “French language module” slowly loading from deep storage as I awkwardly translated my English thoughts into French to speak with the staff at each store. It occurs to me that I used to do this mental translation somewhat in reverse (Creole/French to English). I can’t recall when my thoughts fully transitioned to English as the primary language but I assume it was during my time in Toronto. I wonder how long it would take for it to reverse once again.
Perhaps part of what makes these interactions awkward is not only language, but that I’m not accustomed to talking to shopkeepers anymore. In Mauritius, I can remember my parents going to the butcher, or the various fruit and vegetable stalls in Port Louis. They knew the merchants and there was this familiarity that simply does not exist in large grocery chains, there or anywhere. The closest thing we’d have to this in the U.S. is farmer’s markets but even so, it wasn’t quite the same.
In the U.S., I almost always use self-checkout so I don’t have to take off the noise-canceling earbuds protecting me from the cacophony of blaring music on twangy speakers, barking dogs (yes, dogs in grocery stores), screaming kids, and general noise that occurs when so many people occupy the same enclosed space. But these tiny stores can barely fit more than two customers at a time; there’s no need for music to drown us out. Under such calmer circumstances, my introvert self surprisingly doesn’t mind the human interaction at all.
Another nice thing about shopping at these stores individually is that you get to talk to experts in their niche. The Italians made sure to (very politely) inform me how to properly use pesto. The fishmonger knew the source for each fish, how long they’ll keep, the best way to prepare them. The wine shop owner knew what to recommend based on what I tend to like.
Of course everything isn’t black and white. If you have a disability, European cities like Paris — with their cobblestone streets, few ramps, and even fewer elevators, of which barely any will feel larger than a matchbox — can be a lot tricker to navigate than Los Angeles where everything is newer, flatter, wider.
And, to be fair, America isn’t all suburbs either. Even in Los Angeles, the quintessential car town with infamous traffic jams, there is a small downtown area that is relatively walkable and so full of character. We lived there for over a year and loved it.
So if you find yourself living in one of those walkable havens in the U.S., I hope you cherish it. Contrary to somewhat popular belief, we do not in fact need more, more, more big box stores with choices galore.
"Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don't seem to be benefiting from it psychologically". — Barry Schwartz
PS: If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my last From The Studio update:
Goodbye Studio, Goodbye California.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update from the studio. That’s partly because the studio is no more. At least… not in its full original form.
Schwartz, Barry (2004). The Paradox of Choice. New York, United States: Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-000568-8.