I love my bike. I use it to go everywhere. I don’t actually even have a driver’s license, half because I don’t want one and half because I’m lazy. Grocery shopping, though, is an area where I’ve always tried to get a ride with someone else, because doing it via bicycle felt daunting.
Well, today I tried it. Cycling to the nearest grocery store was the most seamless shopping experience I’ve ever had, hands down.
overall experience
The route from my apartment to the nearest grocery store takes 11 minutes via bike. About 90% of that is along a labelled bike route, and I only have to cross one main road. I genuinely had no idea this route existed until I looked up how to get to the supermarket on my bike. If I’d known, I’d likely have tried this long ago.
One thing that had scared me off previously was the thought of bike parking. I’m generally pretty lucky with places to park my bike, since this is a college town, but I haven’t noticed any bike parking when going shopping before.
In the end, I decided that if it came to it I’d lock my bike to a cart return station. However, I did manage to find a bike parking rack, albeit a run-down one bolted too close to the wall to actually be used as intended. A win, nonetheless!
Another concern was my intention to carry my groceries home via my backpack. This didn’t turn out being too difficult, since I only bought a week of groceries and am only cooking for myself. When relying on others for rides, I tried to buy a few weeks of groceries at a time.
The hidden benefit there is that my food will be fresher and I’ll have more freedom to decide each week what I want to cook.
The hidden challenge is that the self-checkout station threw a fit at me trying to use my own backpack instead of the provided disposable plastic bags. But I think that’s an issue with Texas supermarkets in general.
My bill ended up being just under $20 for a week’s worth of groceries. Not bad at all! It helps that I have a few things already, but I’m still proud of myself for keeping costs low.
As for time, it took me 55 minutes from “walking out of my apartment’s door” to “groceries are in the fridge”. Far better than any other method I’ve tried or considered to go shopping.
conclusion
I will be doing this again, no doubt. Shopping via bike was easy, quick, cheap, and great exercise. Besides, there’s a really freeing feeling to biking: having everything I’ll need for the week in my backpack and powering my own journey with my own muscles feels massively efficient compared to dumping a bunch of bags in the backseat of a car.
Have you tried this before? Would you like to? Is there something I’m missing? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
