Traveling for groceries is what I will NOT do. I live 2 blocks from an acceptable if not great store. I have fruits & veg delivered weekly as well as milk (yes, very lucky to have a millkman) and I will stock up at the farmers markets which only run in summer/fall here due to short growing season in New England. The farthest I will go is a bus ride to the other end of town to Trader Joe's but I do that maybe 4 times a year to stock up. If I'm around a nice food shop incidentally I will stop in and pick up a few things.

20 minutes, tops...because Wegman's isn't closer than that.

We just moved to a town in which the only grocery store that is reasonably priced and has a good selection is Wal-Mart. It annoys me, but I can't bring myself to drive forty minutes to the next city just to avoid shopping there.

Now, if I already happen to be visiting a city with a Trader Joe's or a Whole Foods, I definitely make time to stop by and pick up some things.

I am fortunate that in my neighborhood (Chicago) I have several different grocery stores within 2-5 blocks. I could not imagine having to travel long distances unless ABSOLUTELY necessary. And I am genuinely interested in knowing what ingredients/food stuffs you cannot find in Chicago and must drive to Niles for instead? Doesnt have Chicago have everything?

I have to drive for an hour to get any food at all. Perks of living in the middle of nowhere!
It does make me plan things out better - or it's made me a better spur of the moment cook with a perpetual "what's left in the fridge" challenge ongoing!

I live in/recently moved to a city with LOTS of shopping options, but haven't been happy with them...usually missing key ingredients in my repertoir or too expensive or produce is crap and all are at least a 10 minute drive, which I find ridiculous considering I live near downtown. I've just found a new store that fits my needs and is a 15 minute drive (within the city). Longer than I'd like, but worth it. The next time I move I'll make sure I'm within a mile or two of a good grocery store.

The irony is I moved from a small town with a perfect co-op that was only 2 blocks away and a gorgeous farmer's market within a mile. You'd think I'd have had a harder time there. I was so lucky and spoiled. :(

One last share, I grew up in northern wisconsin and no joke, you HAD to drive at least 1/2 an hour to get to the closest grocery store. Much less in the way of impulse shopping up there!

We live in DC and the food shopping options are halfway decent to non-existent. I try to keep it local as much as possible, but do go out to the burbs probably 3-5 times a month. Favorite store is 25 miles away, oddly, in the middle of nowhere; the other about 12 miles. Not exactly thrilled with it, but it is what it is.

Not at all. I have it delivered - thanks Fresh Direct!

We're about a 5-minute walk from a huge grocery store. Fortunately both our drives home from work go past farmer's markets and our favorite health food store. Not sure if that counts as driving "to" the store.

I love grocery shopping and am willing to travel a bit of a distance to get what I want. That being said, though, I probably wouldn't go to the burbs just to get something--but I would definitely hit it up if I were out in that direction. I'm also more than willing to go to multiple stores to get things--Trader Joe's for wine/cheese, Whole Foods for cheese/special ingredients/bulk, Jewel for standard stuff, Stanley's or the farmer's market for produce.

i live in a mecca of great grocery store options. all within walking distance. i have a BJ's (similar to Sam's Club or Costco) and a Shoprite (typical big box grocery) 3 blocks in 1 direction, a Key Foods (big box but not AS big box as Shoprite) 3 blocks in another direction, amazing bodega with fresh, cheap produce around the corner, a hispanic grocery store with a great butcher 1 block away, a meat market and vietnamese grocery 3 blocks in another direction, and a few indian and philipino grocery stores about a mile away with a few bakeries on the way. we also have numerous farmers markets within a 8 block radius of my house.

(high five to jersey city!!)

no trader joe's or whole foods though... gotta train it to manhattan for that.

I only drive about 5 miles to my preferred Central Market. The two grocery stores closest to me are a not very nice Kroger and a questionable Wal-Mart (I once saw a man picking up and throwing down apples. I decided not to buy apples that day.). The quality of produce and other items I get by driving just a little farther is worth it to me. I would be willing to drive a little farther if necessary to get quality produce.

I live in an absolute grocery bull's eye: within 2 miles of my home are a Trader Joe's, a Whole Foods, 3 Publixes and 2 Krogers. Also within this distance are three weekly farmers' markets. And a corner convenience store next door for last-minute alcohol needs. So I can't imagine having to travel farther than that for ANYTHING.

Unfortunately, we have nothing quite within walking distance. It's 2 miles to the nearest grocery store (a Shoppers, which I really like) and 2 miles in the opposite direction to Whole Foods. We have to drive to Shoppers, but can hop the bus to get to Whole Foods. Aside from that, it's 8 miles to H-Mart and 13 miles for Trader Joe's or Costco. Weekly, Shoppers is the go-to with a monthly/bi-monthly trip to the 'burbs.

Ha! Chicagocook has my grocery-circuit when I lived in Chicago down to every detail (except I would pick up cooking/baking basics at Aldi's instead of Jewel - saved bushels of cash that way). When I lived in the city, it was easy to justify popping over to several places to get the best deals, since you'd have to deal with traffic anyway (situation is obviously different for someone without a vehicle!).

Now I'm in a much smaller town and EVERYTHING is 10 minutes away, including the local grocery we go to. (After trying several I found the perfect compromise between the generic King Soopers/Safeway and Whole Paycheck).

I say keep trying different places and routes until you find an ideal routine. It all depends on your priorities as a cook and consumer and where your priorities are. :)

The house that my fiancee and I bought this year is just 2 miles from a supermarket.

However, this is not our preferred place to shop, as a lot of the time the produce is not that fresh, the bakery items aren't tasty, and the meat is overpriced. We generally only go there for emergencies or if other options are closed.

Running a quick count on my fingers (haha) within 10 miles we have (easily) 8 Supermarkets or Department Stores with Grocery, 3 Big-Box, 2 Off-Brand Cheapie, and 1 locally owned Grocery. That's not counting the 3-4 butchers, 5-6 bakeries, 2 farm markets, drug stores with bread and milk, and convenience stores.

And yet, we do not have a single location that we can go for ALL of our shopping concerns. We have, so far, broken it up according to need. Go to specific stores for specific needs.

Fully on topic, the farthest we drive for groceries is 20 miles to a decently-low priced butcher/deli that we easily save money on a single trip (even with a bridge toll) due to buying meats and a few other things in bulk.

I live in a neighborhood with a lot of food options. There are several grocery stores, an organic co-op a nice fruiterie, a farmer's market twice a week and several bakeries, a fish market and a butcher a bit further away. I sometimes take the metro to go to a big farmer's market a bit further away but that is about as far I will go. I don't have a car so going to the suburbs is out of the question and nothing in the suburbs is as nice as what I can get in town anyways.

We can walk to 2 groceries and a farmer's market on Tuesday and Saturday throughout the fall and summer. We still drive 60 miles 3 or 4 times a year to stock up on staples at a good price. That again is the price of living in a small town in the boonies. However, we can also have our own garden, and can and preserve from it.

Within in 1.5 miles from my house I have:
- the little locally owned grocery with a good selection of non-Asian ethnic food (think matzo, everything from Goya and a ton of British imports).
- a basic big name grocery (Albertson's) for basics
- Whole Foods
- Walmart for those days when you also need office supplies and shampoo.

My favorite Asian grocery is 5.5 miles (and we usually hit it when we head to our town's Vietnamese area for pho).

In about a year, I'll be able to add Trader Joe's within 2.5 miles to that list. However, before the Trader Joe's is functioning, I'll likely have moved 15 miles away to my boyfriend's house in the sticks, with just a Walmart and a mid-sized grocery nearby. The things we do for love and two bathrooms.

Why didn't you just go to Joong Boo? I imagine that's what you traveled out to Niles for?

I have a variety of grocery stores within a 5 minute drive from my house, all on my way home from work. The one exception I make is driving 20 min to the west side of town to go Trader Joes every once in awhile.

I used to live less than 1 block from Trader Joe's so I'd walk there all the time (never drive).

I moved about 3 blocks away and now bike to work so I just bike there on my way home and pick up stuff to put in my bike basket (you can carry a good amount)

Short answer: I travel 4 blocks. I practically never drive to the grocery store. I like that when you walk or bike you pay more attention to how much you purchase (which saves money) and therefore waste less.

Other than Trader Joe's I also live less than 1 mile from a Fresh N Easy and a Pavilions. I'll also bike there if I need something from them.

Once every 3 months I'll treat myself to the Asian supermarket which is 4 miles away and only then I'll drive.

There's a good grocery store in my neighborhood, and it's on my way home from work. They have everything I need, or will get it for me if I ask. The only other place to get groceries in our town is Walmart, and it's across town (about 10 minutes). I don't shop there.

If the locations were reversed, I still wouldn't shop at Walmart, so I guess my answer is that I currently drive about four minutes, but if I had to I'd drive 10.

Within walking/biking distance from my apartment is a Whole Foods, a Trader Joe's, and a Safeway (plus a few natural foods stores and a farmer's market). Yet I travel about 15 minutes (driving; a hour biking or bus riding) every week to go to a grocery store where I can (almost always) get everything I want in one go (the exceptions necessitating sending my wife on a side trip to a Mexican or Japanese market on her way home from work).

If I didn't make the trip, I would go to Whole Foods, and Safeway, and the farmer's market (and the same side trips) every week, and I would spend more. Not worth it.

i go half an hour to my favorite asian shops. I live in the middle of LA and right by my house is a european grocery store, trader joes, whole foods, and a hispanic grocery store.

I recently moved further away from my favorite produce/international market, which is now 13 miles away. So now I only go about twice a month. Pretty much any other time I get food items from the larger nearby Acme (2.5 miles). However, if the sales are good enough, I'll also stop at Pathmark and/or Shoprite, which is in between the two.

Usually five minutes, maybe fifteen if I want to go to a very specific store or to the market.

By foot/or bike of course.

I live a 5 minute drive from a very good food coop which is where i do almost all of my shopping. I also can walk to a small corner store a few blocks away if I just need to pick up one thing. Once or twice a month I drive 15 minutes to Trader Joe's to stock up on certain things. I can't think of anything I can't get locally that would be worth driving 40 minutes for.

We live just under a kilometre from the two nearest supermarkets, and that's our default source for groceries; typically we walk, unless we know we're going to be getting a lot of heavy or bulky stuff. There's also a corner store that carries some okay (though not great) produce, a cheese shop, and two Portuguese butchers within a few minutes' walk that help to fill last-minute needs, too. We'll bike or drive, depending on how much else we need to do that day, to the St. Lawrence farmer's market on Saturdays once or twice a month - that's a bit more than 5km away.

I admit I'm pretty spoiled. We have a grocery store within walking distance -- four Southern California blocks, which is about a half-mile. But, we don't frequent it much since the prices are higher there than we'd like. We frequent another corporate chain that's about five to 10 minutes away by car.

There's also the twice-a-month trips to the natural food store, either the family-owned one or the small local chain, both of which are 10 minutes away. About every few months, I make the trek to the larger Asian markets and bakeries, which are 20 minutes away, but located near the homes of my extended family. I also get fresh fruit from my grandmother's yard (plums, persimmons, grapefruit, mandarins, etc.); she lives about 10 minutes away by car.

Lastly, there are the things available to me that I just don't hit up -- the neighborhood adjacent to mine is really diverse and has African, Vietnamese and Latino grocers and bakeries; there's also my employer-sponsored CSA; and my city's farmers market.

I will drive up to 20 miles, because just like falnfenix said, Wegmans isn't closer than that.

I'm in LA: I live within a mile of a two kosher markets (cheap produce!), a Smart & Final, a Fresh & Easy Express, an Indian spice market, and a weekly farmer's market. I usually manage pretty well between those stores.

Occasionally I'll pick up specific things from Trader Joe's or the Japanese market on my way back from work. Every couple of months we may drive a couple of miles to stock up at Costco or 99 Ranch.

On the rare occasion I will put up with an hour long bus ride to get to Chinatown for Vietnamese groceries when I can't wait for a weekend shopping trip with the BF.

Produce, grains, and beans all come from the Asian supermarket by my train station (1mi). Trader Joes is for meat, cheese, their little boxed goodies, yogurt, milk, flowers, wine, and beer (3mi). Giant (1mi, but hate it) or Safeway (3mi) for toiletries, King Arthur's flour (argh, I've become a snob), and yeast.

We generally don't shop around for price (though the Asian market's produce is way better and way cheaper than anything else), we shop for what we like and luckily live in a place that accommodates that.

I just moved to Maryland this week. There are two grocery stores within 5 miles and a few produce stands. This will suffice for most of the human food. Our rabbit is another story. I only feed him organic greens and there is nearly nothing organic in the grocery stores. One sells organic romaine (which was old when I saw it) for $6.99. Hellll no. I bought the exact same romaine for $2.99, fresh, in my hometown in PA. But he also needs parsley and kale which there was none (even in non-organic).

So for the rabbit, every week and a half, I will have to drive 30 minutes to a Whole Foods, because organic around the corner is not fresh or worth the price. Sure, you could say I am wasting gas money and I might as well just pay the insane price, but I can still do some shopping in Whole Foods I can't anywhere else as a non-dairy or soy user.

i am lucky to live in the suburbs, there's a major shopping sentre with two supermarkets near my work and a smaller one that is closer to home, so i can get stuff before or after work very easily. there's also a fruit and veg shop i can walk or ride my bike to during my lunchbreak (exercise with a goal!). but on 'my side of the river' (in hobart) there are few speciality shops, like my favourite italian providore, so once a month i drive there especially to stock up on my favourite pastas, tinned tomatos and little italian treats.

I walk one block to the grocery store, four blocks to the farmers market.

When it comes to proximity to grocery stores Austin is awesome. I live less than a mile from wheatsville co-op, Natural Grocers, and Central Market. The wednesday market is about a mile and half away and Whole Foods is a ten min drive (w/ no traffic) :-)
Most of the time I bike or walk to the store. It makes it easy to shop everyday. I went to school for three years in Arkansas before transferring to UT and I vowed never to walk into a Walmart ever again :-)

I live just a few minutes from a Kroger, and I get some bulk stuff (mostly flours) at a health food store very near my house. There's also a Whole Foods nearby, but I refuse to shop there on principle.

It really depends on where I'm going and what I'm looking for...Sometimes I'll do one full shopping trip to more than one store...Generally speaking I try to keep it at half an hour tops...If it's a place that's approximately 50 min away (one way) I consider that a special trip.

But I will say that I keep a cooler in my car, and I have several ice packs on hand just in case for long shopping trips.

When I was younger, my family lived in a Middle Eastern country with a ton of grocery stores. On our street alone, we had grocery stores that were literally 2 MINUTES WALK (not drive, walk) from each other. I think there were about four grocery stores on that half-mile road.

Where I live now, though, I don't have to travel more than 15 minutes for the grocery, which is great. Occasionally, I'll go to a specialty store, but not very often.

Currently I am a student in the Netherlands, and both of the most decent supermarkets are within 1.5km of my apartment. However, both are only adequate; poor selection of meats and vegetables one, the other is a hit & miss depending on what I'm searching for. Fortunately I have the added bonus of having a huge Asian supermarket which is great for a lot of vegetables, spices, herbs and so forth. As a bonus, there is also a local market twice a week with fresh produce and other stalls for such as cheese, fish, grains and whatnot.
Having these shops close by also means that I am very efficient with the way that I spend money on food, and almost anything goes to waste because I can buy my dinner ingredients on my way back from university!

Back at home, my parents live on the outskirts of Brussels, where we have about...5 different supermarkets within a 10 minute drive. Three of them being a 10-15 walk.
Generally we alternate between the two biggest ones, depending on what's on the menu for the week, as one has a better "international" selection.

I can't ever imagine being half an hour or more drive away from the supermarket...
Guess I am quite lucky living where I am!

I can walk to the local farmer's market, and there's also a punjab market in walking distance (the BEST for spices, tea, rice etc...). Other than that it's a 10 minute drive to a big box grocery and a 15 minute drive to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.

The one upside of my wife and I working 50 miles apart at our two jobs is that she is in an area with decent grocery stores and I have access to a BJ's Wholesale. She also has access to Trader Joe's but quite frankly I don't get their appeal (it's just more processed food!)

So the answer for us is between 3 and 50 miles but we never travel 50 miles *just* to get groceries.

The real question should be "How far does your food travel for you?"

I make regular trips to the grocery store, which I often walk to (though most people think that's crazy). But I try to get to a Whole Foods and/or Trader Joes every month or two. Both stores are about 15 or so miles. If I go a little farther, I can hit both at once because they're right next to each other.

I walk for 2 mins.

For a limited selection and "meh" produce, at slightly expensive prices: 30 min/20 miles,
For a good selection and high prices: 45 min/55 miles.
For good selection and low prices: 1.5 hr / 90 miles.

At other times of the year, I live 3 blocks from an organic co-op, and 10 from a supermarket.

I find that I spend less and eat more healthfully when I have to travel farther and provision more wisely.

And yes, I DO drive for groceries. :)

Except when I live in town, then I bike.

Niles? Do you go to Fresh Farms?! When I lived in Chicago (Andersonville) I always schlepped out to Fresh Farms because it is pretty great. Now that I live in Virginia I have Wegmans, but I still drive 30 minutes to get there.