"weekly shopping".

There's your difference. In those places, you do 5-10 minutes of shopping 7 days a week, instead of 60 minutes of shopping once a week. Those corner grocery stores are tiny, you can be in and out quick.

I really doubt any daily shopping can be done in 5 minutes. Most NYC grocery stores are very busy. Going to the store every day seems ridiculously inefficient, and corner stores rarely have everything, forcing multiple stops.

You can grab a meat, a veg, and a loaf of bread and pay for it with cash in under two minutes, let alone five.

Corner stores may not, but there are plenty of compact grocery stores in Europe that do. And yes, the five minutes should not be taken literally. On the other hand, if it's on your way home--which is usually the idea--you don't need to park, walk from your car to the store, go through a lengthy check-out with lots of items, hoof it all back to your car, get back out of the parking lot, etc.

I don't know about Europe but the in the Middle East you usually would just go straight to the shop keeper and ask for the items you want and he would have someone grab them for you.

See, the issue is that you're doing weekly shopping in the first place.

I typically shop on Sunday, which carries me over til Wednesday, then shop on W/Th. I know quite a few people that shop almost every day.

No no, it works differently. The concept of weekly shopping is completely alien and baffling to people living there.

This is the way it works:

Your wife/mom/yourself want to cook pasta today, but some ingredient is lacking (say, tomatoes). So you go to the store and get some tomatoes.

On your way you might grab two or three other items, but that's it.

There's no such thing as weekly shopping.

Yeah, hard for me to imagine, as we do a lot more that get ingredients for dinner. Packing school and work lunches, everything we drink, breakfasts, paper goods, cleaning supplies, personal care items, in addition to food, there's usually too much to fit in one large.cart.

Corner groceries in Europe have a surprisingly large variety. You may not be able to get everything you get at Costco, but you'd be surprised how much you can get, a little bit at a time.

I spent a few months living in Berlin and routinely shopped at places like Kaiser's and Netto. I never had any problems with product selection or diversity.

But yes, there are other differences in consumption patterns and psychology, too. As a general statement, everything in W. Europe is more minimalistic, since there isn't so much room to just store "stuff". It's hard to describe exactly what you would buy instead or what you'd do differently without knowing you closely, but I think you'd find it's a completely survivable adaptation. :-)

There's absolutely no reason to buy everything at once other than habit. It's not as though you run out of food and cleaning supplies and washroom items all at the same time.