How do you guys buy groceries?
Orange County, Ca, USA:
There are three grocery stores within 5 minutes drive of my house. I go maybe 2-3 times per week and never leave with more at a time than I can carry in one trip to/from the car. Since one of those stores sits between the freeway off-ramp and my house, it's easy to stop by whenever I want, coming or going. No need to make a special trip, no need to push a full-sized cart around. Simply walk in, pick up a hand basket, spend maybe 5 minutes getting what I want, leave. I use automatic checkout probably 80% of the time. I don't use coupons or make lists. I generally know what I want going in, and if for some reason the price of something is more than I feel like paying or something is out of stock, I can simply pass on it and pick it up next time from another store.
sometimes some stores might not stock cream cheese.
Irrelevant to me, because grocery stores are only slightly less common than gas stations here. There are a few items that I know if I want them, to go to a different store instead of the one 1000 feet away from the freeway, but going to that other store only adds about 2 minutes each way to my transit time.
Or hypermarts charge double the prices you can get at a bakery store.
Every grocery store in my area has a dedicated bakery inside the store. If you know their schedule you can walk in and get fresh bread right as they pull it out of the oven. It's cheaper than the mass produced shipped stuff full of preservatives. They take custom orders if you want a cake with specific icing designs. Also, never used it myself but I think at least one of them has a cake printer so you can text them images from your phone and they'll print that image on your cake. Also, two deli area is standard: both a "cooked food" area where they make sandwiches, pasta, and party platters and things that you can buy by the pound, cheese freshly sliced off the roll while you watch as well as a butcher where you can tell them what you want and watch as they chop the meat.
These are large chain stores. Albertson's, Ralph's, Pavillions etc.
Or you spend like half an hour looking for parking, which is not worth the $0.20 savings.
This problem doesn't exist in my area. Here are a couple local grocery stores as shown in google earth:
As you can see the parking lots are bigger than the stores themselves, and half the spaces are routinely available. It's not more than a couple hundred feet from an available parking space to the front door.
In Malaysia, supermarkets charge much higher than your regular mom and pop stores because you don't have to waste time searching for certain brands. But heard that in the US, the supermarkets are much cheaper because of economy of scale.
In my area the mom and pop stores charge more than the chains. People go to mom and pop's mostly for the experience, and for the novelty of being able to say that they do so. We do have farmer's markets, for example, where growers will set up tents and sell what they personally produce, but very few people go to them, and I only even know they exist because my grandmother routinely vends at one. Though if you want fresh produce, this is the way to go, since it's possible to get vegetables and things literally hours after they've been picked.