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Comment by throwawayjava | Hacker News Reader

> Walmart is cheaper on many things

Caveat: only if you need a car anyways. If you only need a car to run errands, Amazon is pretty competitive for pretty much anything except fresh groceries.

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In other words if you live anywhere in the country outside of a couple of cities.

I'd put the number closer to 100. All states have at least one metro area with good enough transit, and most have either two larger metros or at least one good-sized college town.

I'm not sure which "couple of cities" you're thinking of, but I'm pretty sure I haven't lived in either of them. And even when I've owned a car, I've never used a car day-to-day.

This has not been my experience.

I live (barely) inside the city limits of a town of 13,000 people, in a county of 37,000. My wife and I both have vehicles and we use both of them probably 80% of days - and I work remotely to boot.

"A couple of" cities was not meant to mean two, but 100 sounds like too many, and even if you live in the best-served metro areas, the service is usually limited to a small portion of it.

I agree with that. There's one US city where it's completely normal and ordinary not to own a car. There are maybe a dozen others where, if you live and work in a relatively central area of the city, you can probably get by without one without too much hardship. Go much beyond that and you may be able to get off without one but a lot of things get harder and you have to compromise on your activities.

18 cities have >25% households without a car. 8-9% of households lack cars.

http://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-v...

Yes, much less than 100 cities. I live in the Phoenix area, and can't imagine how hard it would be without a car. It's so spread out that it isn't funny. I have a car mostly because I like driving, but still would have one if I didn't, just not the same kind of car.

I also feel like a certain number of those people are carless not by choice but because they cannot afford a car, and are putting up with a pretty extreme level of inconvenience.

I will tell you that South Dakota absolutely does not have that, and unless you're in the dorms of one of the schools and can bum a ride with someone who's already going, a car is required.

That's probably a bit of an exaggeration but I daresay that there are very few people who own a car solely to run errands today. If I need to own a car to run errands, I probably need a car for other reasons too.

What is true is that there are people who live in cities and use Zipcar, Uber, regular rentals, etc. instead of owning. If that's the case, the cost calculus changes if you need to pay in order to run errands.

It's not. The amount of places where you can get by without having your own car is pretty small in this country.

I honestly don't think anyone who doesn't live in the center of a city everyone's heard of uses a service like Zipcar, but sure, if you need to rent a car to go Walmart looks less attractive. If you need to rent a car to go you also probably don't live near a Walmart, which as far as I know has abandoned the urban concept and decided to stick with their rural/suburban box store.

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