As someone who lives with their spouse in a highrise dozens of stories tall built on top of a MTR (mass transit rail) station in a city (Hong Kong) that has what is widely considered a wonderful mass transit system and who regularly walks everywhere, including to and from my local supermarket, and who does not own a vehicle, I would like to respond to your post.

Imagine that you wanted to cook chili for dinner (and leftovers for lunch the next day and or chili dogs a few days on -- YUM!). Recipes differ, but let's say that you went with ground beef, canned beans, tomato sauce of some kind, fresh onions and garlic, and maybe some bell peppers. You might have bought some cheese to grate over bowls of the finished chili and sour cream to spoon onto the cheese. Assume that you already had chili powder and any other spices that you needed at home. Since you're at the supermarket, you also bought the other things that you needed: a bottle of shampoo, some toilet tissue, a lightbulb(it would be slightly cheaper to get a 6-pack of bulbs but you only need one right now and don't want to carry anything absolutely unnecessary home) like, a couple of cartons of milk, some coffee or tea, a carton or two of eggs, some chicken breasts, more vegetables, etc. At the checkout, you bagged your own purchases or had them bagged for you and began the five-to-ten-minute walk home.

(1.) Unfortunately, it was warm out and the cartons of milk sweated and the condensation soaked through that bag (the supermarket uses eco-friendly, recyclable paper bags) and the bottom tore out and everything from that bag fell onto the sidewalk. Time to set your bags on the pavement or the grass next to the sidewalk and try to distribute those items between the remaining bags. The bag holding the ground beef and chicken breasts is looking a bit iffy too, but it'll probably hold (fingers crossed!) until you get home. The milk cartons have warmed up a bit and hopefully won't sweat enough to take the bag(s) into which you've placed them before you get home.

(2.) Wait. Suppose that you opted for the (biodegradable) plastic bags. Condensation wouldn't affect them. As you were walking home, however, one of the corners of one of the milk cartons, with the help of gravity and the movements to which the bag containing the milk was subjected as you walked home, made a whole in the bottom of the bag, with the same result as if you had been using paper bags.

(3.) OK, so you wisely double-bagged (in plastic) your groceries and you made it home without any bags failing. Unfortunately, something in the bag with the carton(s) of eggs shifted while you were humping the bags home and a coupel of the eggs broke, making a bit of a mess in the bag.

(4.) No, of course you wouldn't haul all of your groceries home at once. That's sheer madness. You only took the perishable items and left the rest to be delivered. That meant an extra few minutes spent at the checkout, at the head of a long line of people, each of whom also had to spend a bit longer in line themselves, giving the store your home address and telephone number and checking with the cashier to find out when your stuff would be delivered (answer: 12PM to 8PM the next day, but the delivery person will phone you first). What's a few extra minutes here or there, right? You also aren't paranoid, so you have no problem giving the store your home address and phone number and don't care whether or not the company owning the supermarket aggregates your purchases with your name, address, and phone number and resells the information to marketers. It's a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to lug all of your stuff home yourself.

Not having all of the ingredients for chili (the cans of beans and jars of tomato sauce are amongst those purchases that were to be delivered), you had something else for dinner instead. You weren't planning to make chili that night anyway, since you took the delivery delay into account when you made your grocery list.

The next day, the delivery guy called you a few times while you were in a meeting and couldn't answer your phone. Jeez, his last message sure sounded irate. He was still annoyed with you when you phoned him back and even more annoyed when you told him that nobody would be home to take delivery until at least 6PM. The earlier he can finish his deliveries, the sooner he can get home and spend time with his own family.

When you got home, at 6 PM, he was waiting for you in the hallway outside your apartment door with your stuff packed in half a dozen repurposed cardboard boxes (from the labels printed on the boxes, you can tell that some of them had held bananas and others had held cartons of eggs) stacked on a little cart. Cardboard is better than plastic (even the biodegradable plastic used in the supermarket's bags), so that was good. Unfortunately, after you transferred the boxes inside your apartment, tipped the delivery guy, and began unpacking the items you had purchased the day before, you discovered that the shampoo had been packed upside down and half its contents had slowly leaked out. It only took a few minutes to wash the shampoo off the cans of beans. No big deal. And you can always get another bottle of shampoo when you go back to the store. Maybe you ought to tighten the top of the bottle a bit before going to the checkout next time, just in case, or carry it home. Carrying a bit more weight will just help build up the muscles in your arms and shoulders, right? As a matter of fact, your shoulders were a bit sore from carrying the perishables home yesterday. Feel the burn, baby!

[to be continued]