I don't understand co-worker. Shopping takes the least amount of time in the home cooking process. I spend about 30-40 minutes on a grocery trip per week, tops. That's, like, one prepared meal.
Not only that, but there are 4 different supermarkets within a 5 min walk radius. I know he's aware of the concept since he sometimes goes to buy a post-lunch snack at the supermarket by work.
That's phenomenal. Generally groceries take me at least two hours, even if the available stores are only 5 to 15 minutes away by car. That's because the products are scattered higgledy-piggledy all over the store, deliberately, so you have to hunt for them and spend more time picking through things you don't need, don't want, and have no intention of buying. The cash registers are mostly unoccupied because Wal-Mart doesn't believe in human staff, the DIY checkout counters are invariably bogged down because the chip card readers are fragile and broken or someone is trying to buy alcohol, cigarettes, a R-rated DVD, something related to birth control, razor blades, or something else that requires professional help. It takes me 30-40 minutes just to get through the checkout line! That's why I refuse to go grocery shopping more than once a week. My daughter still doesn't understand why I can't "JUST slip out to the grocery store on the way home from work because it's NO BIG DEAL" on a daily or near-daily basis. Each such slippage takes more than an hour of my time, and she's unwilling to help with the shopping process since it's not something that interests her and she doesn't think it's an effective use of
her time, which she considers to be far more valuable than mine. So she refuses to write down the things she wants onto a grocery list, when I ask if she has any special requests for food or toiletries she says "no, I don't need anything", and then a day later she bitches me out when I don't magically guess what she wants or needs, and throws a tantrum if I don't run out and get what she wants now-now-now. If I'm busy with something else and can't drop everything to run the errand for her immediately, she flies into a snit and runs around telling other people I don't support her and she "has to" buy everything she needs because I'm oh-so-cheap.
There used to be a grocery store about 3 miles from me, with well trained cashiers who had been doing their jobs for years and who knew what they were doing. But a Wal-Mart sleazed into the neighborhood despite having a super-center less than 2 miles away. They greased some palms with the liquor control board to get a booze-selling license the neighborhood didn't want them to have, and put the mom-and-pop place out of business because a sizable amount of their business depended on booze sales. So now although the "neighborhood market" is closer, it's basically a glorified convenience store and you have to go to at least two places to get groceries or else drive at least five or six miles out of the way. The groceries are Wal-Groceries, so basic things I need such as cheesecloth and the right kind of pectin simply aren't available anymore.
Other things that can't actually be successfully bought, but that are present in the grocery store, include most kinds of frozen food. When it thaws before you can get it through the checkout line, you can't buy things like ice cream. Well, you can put it in your cart, head for the checkout line, and by the time you physically get it out of the store it's liquid. If you try to go when the lines are shorter, there won't be any managers available to fix the invariable screw-up when the cashier forgets to cancel the order ahead of yours before beginning and needs a manager to override the mistake. Cashiers aren't given the authority to void transactions, and there's no way to page a manager because they're "roaming". So you, or someone ahead of you, has to wait until the manager finishes up a break, or a personal conversation, or something else. I've walked away from two Wal-marts in the past month and left groceries in the cart for return or on the conveyor belt, simply because after half an hour to 45 minutes of standing in line it was still simply impossible to check out. I haven't seen such retail inefficiency since I visited the USSR late in the Gorbachev administration. But the option of going somewhere else simply doesn't exist. Wal-Monopoly has that part of the city completely tied up and there simply aren't other places to get groceries.