Never underestimate cultural momentum I guess. NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2. Doctors refused to wash their hands before doing procedures. There’s so many things that seem obvious in retrospect but took a long time to become accepted
Hey and you can use both lanes in a zip merge!
Isn't that the law anyway?
Morale: follow the rules.
>NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2
And the game is worse for it :')
This is a fundamental problem in sports. Baseball is going the same way. Players are incentivized to win, and the league is incentivized to entertain. Turns out these incentives are not aligned.
> Players are incentivized to win, and the league is incentivized to entertain.
Players are incentivized to win due to specific decisions made by the league.
In Bananaball the league says, "practice your choreographed dance number before batting practice." And those same athletes are like, "Wait, which choreographed dance number? The seventh inning stretch, the grand finale, or the one we do in the infield when the guy on stilts is pitching?"
Edit: the grand finale dance number I saw is both teams dancing together. That should be noted.
Sure. There's a market for that. But the NBA sells a lot more tickets than the Harlem Globetrotters.
But that's a matter of scale. When I was a child, the Harlem Globetrotters were far more more famous than any 3-4 NBA teams combined. They were in multiple Scooby Doo movies/episodes. They failed tp scale the model, but wrestling didn't.
Would be very curious about, say, the worst MLB team's ticket sales vs. the Savannah Bananas.
This isn't right - the league can change the rules. NFL has done a wonderful job over the years on this.
Baseball has done a terrible job, but at least seems to have turned the corner with the pitch clock. Maybe they'll move the mound back a couple feet, make the ball 5.5oz, reduce the field by a player and then we'll get more entertainment and the players can still try their hardest to win.
I wonder if anyone has made an engine for simulating MLB play with various rule changes.
Personally, I think it'd be interesting to see how the game plays if you could only have two outfielders (but you could shift however you choose.)
It's a good thought.
I'd guess MLB The Show video game wouldn't be a bad place to start. They should have a decent simulator built in.
And the ongoing gambling scandal gives credence to a third incentive I've long suspected. Only half joking
Something Derek Thompson has written about https://archive.ph/uSgNd
Is it ? I, for one, enjoy watching the 3s raining down!
They did wash their hands. Turns out that soap and water wasn't quite enough. Lister used carbolic acid (for dressing and wound cleaning) and Semmelweis used chlorinated lime (for hand washing).
And Semmelweis is a perfect case against being an asshole who's right: He was more right than wrong (he didn't fully understand why what he was doing helped, but it did) but he was such a horrible personality and such an amazing gift for pissing people off it probably cost lives by delaying the uptake of his ideas.
But this is getting a bit off topic, I suppose.
Or you could say it the other way around: Even leading scientists are susceptible to letting emotions get the best of them and double-down defending their personal investments into things.
"A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck.
Was soap often used prior to the mid 1800s?
That was later; earlier in history doctors (or "doctors" if you so insist) did not wash their hands.
I was mainly pushing back on the idea that something as seemingly obvious as hand washing was the thing that made surgery safe. It took quite a bit more than just simple hand washing.
People paid 100x more for their hosting when using aws cloud until they realized they never neded 99.97% uptime for their t-shirt business. Oh wait too soon. Save for post for the future.
People paid only 100x more than self hosting to use AWS until they realized that they could get a better deal by paying 200x for a service that is a wrapper over AWS but they never have to think about since it turns out that for most businesses that 100x is like 30 bucks a month.
People spent half their job figuring out self hosted infrastructure until they realized they rather just have some other company deploy their website when they make a commit.
kubernetes
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Usually when someone comes with that argument, I ask them to pick any week date in the past year and then I take a random item on my calendar on that day; I give them the time and address of where I need to be as well as the address of my home and I ask them how long it's going to take me and how much it's going to cost. That's usually enough to bring them down a notch from "train work" to "sometimes train work". (But they tend to forget very often, they need to be reminded regularly for some reason). Do you want to play that game with me to get your reality check in order ?
Western Europe in a VERY dense city BTW.
> I give them the time and address of where I need to be [...] That's usually enough to bring them down a notch from "train work" to "sometimes train work" [...] Do you want to play that game with me to get your reality check in order ?
I don't think the implied claim is that there should be specifically a train to every particular address, if that's what you're counting as failure in the game, but rather that with good public transport (including trains) and pedestrian/cyclist-friendly streets it shouldn't be the case that most people need to drive.
Cars are so flexible. It's the answer to so many questions outside "how to move one or two people from A to common destination B".
Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper.
Don't want to get rained on? Or heatstroke? Or walk through snow? Or carry a bunch of stuff, like a groceries/familyWeek or whatever else? Or go into the countryside/camping? Or move a differently-abled person? Or go somewhere outside public transport hours? Or, or .. or.
Are there many cases where people should take public transport or ride a bike instead of their car? Obviously yes. But once you have a car to cover the exigent circumstances it is easy to use them for personal comfort reasons.
> Cars are so flexible.
They’re also a joke when it comes to moving large numbers of people. I can’t imagine the chaos if everyone leaving a concert at Wembley Stadium decided to leave by car.
You wouldn't have to imagine it if you visited Dallas. AT&T stadium has roughly the same capacity as Wembley, and no public transit at all.
Dallas would look very different if they emphasized public transport. Outside of downtown it is so sparse, many of the suburbs suffer from crumbling infrastructure because it turns out pipes made to last 30 years do poorly after 40 to 50 years when all the low density suburbs have aged out and there is no remaining land to subsidize the infrastructure ponzi scheme.
Fort Worth is worse for this!
Strongtowns is definitely worth a listen.
Are they crap during peak hour traffic or mass public events? Sure are! They're not some miracle device.
But people claiming that you can live a life without cars don't seem to realise the very many scenarios where cars are often easier and sometimes the only answer.
Until everyone wants to go from A to B, when a traffic jam happens. If that happens quite often, it might be more convenient to use a bicycle, an umbrella or snow boots.
Yes, cars are flexible. They are jacks of all trades, but masters of none. At long distances, trains win handily. At short distances, bikes do.
> Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper.
That's the issue―the average car occupancy is <1.5. Our goal should be to raise it, by offering alternatives to cars in cases where they're not appropriate.
> Are there many cases where people should take public transport or ride a bike instead of their car? Obviously yes.
Not many, most. Cars are a niche, they're only economical when transporting a few people with cargo over medium distances. Everything else is more efficiently covered by another mode of transport.
And "obviously", huh? Look outside. It's all roads.
> But once you have a car to cover the exigent circumstances it is easy to use them for personal comfort reasons.
You'd be surprised. The Netherlands is the best example of this―the Dutch own almost as many cars per person as Americans do, yet they cycle orders of magnitude more.
It's a matter of designing our built environment to make the most efficient mode of transportation for the situation the most convenient option.
My initial post had the context of "life as it is now". To further these thoughts though:
> > Need to move 3 or 4 people? Driving the car may be cheaper. >That's the issue―the average car occupancy is <1.5. Our goal should be to raise it, by offering alternatives to cars in cases where they're not appropriate.
When I said this, I meant in terms of $ to the individual making the choice. Apart from city parking costs, and congestion charges, with modern phones being used a lot for transport these days could we do dynamic group discounts? IE my transport app shows a QR code, my friends who are coming with me scan it with their transport app and by travelling together(beeping on and off at the same locations within the same timeslot) we get a discount?
> Not many, most. Cars are a niche, they're only economical when transporting a few people with cargo over medium distances. Everything else is more efficiently covered by another mode of transport.
I agree in the context of city planning and public transport being a lot better than it is now. Otherwise, the last mile problem is a hard one to get past. As soon as you walk or ride a bike to the station/bus-stop you've introduced constraints on cargo, physical fitness and weather. All mostly easier with a car. Also, a car provides freedom/flexibility for midday decisions like "I'll do the groceries on the way from work" or "my wife had an issue at work, so I'll go pick up the kids this afternoon" or similar - harder to do if you've committed to pubic transport in the morning.
> And "obviously", huh? Look outside. It's all roads.
Where I am, public transport is buses. Bicycles are meant to ride on the road. So the roads are still used even if the car isn't.
> You'd be surprised. The Netherlands is the best example of this―the Dutch own almost as many cars per person as Americans do, yet they cycle orders of magnitude more.
This is one thing I find frustrating. But not everyone has a "default active" lifestyle. Many are quite sedentary. Also, a significant chunk of car costs - purchase/depreciation, yearly insurance and registration - are not mileage based. But it is frustrating that other options are not even considered. Again though, urban planning and current public transport shape the society we live in for generations. Maybe we'd all be more active if it was better done.
> It's a matter of designing our built environment to make the most efficient mode of transportation for the situation the most convenient option.
So much this. But there is a lot to overcome. Individualism, NIMBYs and cars themselves as a status symbol of freedom and "go anywhere, go anytime" flexibility. I don't see how to do it - but I'd support smart attempts to try.
The argument there is a little dishonest, given that if you only had the option of riding public transit that your schedule would indeed be well conformed to using public transit. I think everyone understands VERY well that they could get from point A to point B faster by using a dedicated vehicle which is solely concerned with getting them from point A to point B, that's not really debatable.
In the states at least if you're using public transit it's generally as an intentional time / cost tradeoff. That's not a mystery and taking a point-to-point schedule and comparing that against public transit constraints doesn't really prove much.
The average European mind can't comprehend freedom of movement across vast amounts of open nature.
I live in Canada, which is similar to the US in this regard, and I can't believe how enslaved we are to the private automobile.
If you want the freedom to move across vast amounts of open nature, then yeah the private automobile is a good approximation for freedom of mobility. But designing urban areas that necessitate the use of a private vehicle (or even mass transit) for such essentials as groceries or education is enslavement. I don't buy the density argument either. Places that historically had the density to support alternative modes of transportation, densities that are lower than they are today, are only marginally accessible to alternative forms of transportation today. Then there is modern development, where the density is decreased due to infrastructure requirements.
To me, "urban planning" has a lot to answer for. They seem to have the foresight of a moth. However, they are probably constrained by politics which is similar.
“enslaved,” really?????
Can you reasonably get by without a car? For most Americans the answer is no. Therefore, yes you are enslaved. You don't have the freedom to choose how you get to work, you have to spend money on a car.
Do you understand what enslavement is? Because it’s not “i can’t reasonably get by,” it’s “I am not recognized as human, I am legally property and have no rights.”
These things are different.
I’m pretty sure we can comprehend it, we just usually enjoy said freedom of movement in nature on our feet rather than sat in an SUV.
Heard an anecdote about a German engineer who was in California (I think San Francisco, but if it was Los Angeles then the distances involved would be even larger) for meetings with American colleagues, and thought he would drive up to Oregon for a day trip. His American colleagues asked him to take another look at the scale on the bottom right of the map, and calculate the driving time. Once he ran the numbers, he realized that his map-reading instincts, trained in Germany, were leading him astray: the scale of maps he was used to had him thinking it was a 2- or 3-hour drive from San Francisco to Oregon. But in fact it's a 6-hour drive just to get to the Oregon border from SF, and if you want to head deeper into the interior then it's probably 9 to 10 hours depending on where you're going.
So no, I don't think Europeans who haven't been in America have quite absorbed just how vast America is. It stretches across an entire continent in the E-W direction, and N-S (its shortest border) still takes nearly a full day. (San Diego to Seattle is about 20 hours, and that's not even the full N-S breadth of the country since you can drive another 2.5 hours north of Seattle before reaching the Canadian border). In fact, I can find a route that goes nearly straight N-S the whole way, and takes 25 hours to drive, from McAllen, TX to Pembina, ND: https://maps.app.goo.gl/BpvjrzJvvdjD9vdi9
Train travel is sometimes feasible in America (I am planning Christmas travel with my family, and we are planning to take a train from Illinois to Ohio rather than fly, because the small Illinois town we'll be in has a train station but no airport; counting travel time to get to the airport, the train will be nearly as fast as flying but a lot cheaper). But there are vast stretches of the country where trains just do not make economic sense, and those whose only experience is in Europe usually don't quite realize that until they travel over here. For most people, they might have an intellectual grasp of the vastness of the United States, but it takes experiencing it before you really get it deep down. Hence why the very smart German engineer still misread the map: his instincts weren't quite lined up with the reality of America yet, and so he forgot to check the scale of the map.
> there are vast stretches of the country where trains just do not make economic sense
There are plenty of city pairs where high speed trains do make economic sense and America still doesn't have them. [1] is a video "56 high speed rail links we should've built already" by CityNerd. And that's aside from providing services for the greater good instead of for profit - subsidizing public transport to make a city center more walkable and more profitable and safer and cleaner can be a worthwhile thing. The US government spends a lot subsidizing air travel.
> So no, I don't think Europeans who haven't been in America have quite absorbed just how vast America is
China had some 26,000 miles of high speed rail two years ago, almost 30,000 miles now connecting 550 cities, and adding another couple of thousand miles by 2030. A hundred plus years ago America had train networks coast to coast. Now all Americans have is excuses why the thing you used to have and tore up is impossible, infeasible, unafordable, unthinkable. You have reusable space rockets that can land on a pillar of fire. If y'all had put as much effort into it as you have into special pleading about why it's impossible, you could have had it years ago.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE5G1kTndI4
Personally, I'd blame California for American voters' distaste for subsidizing high-speed rail. They look at the massive budget (and time) overruns of California's celebrated high-speed rail, and say "I don't want that waste of money happening in MY state, funded with MY state taxes" and then vote against any proposed projects.
This is, of course, a massively broad generalization, and there will be plenty of voters who don't fit that generalization. But the average American voter, as best I can tell, recoils from the words "high-speed rail" like Dracula would recoil from garlic. And I do believe that California's infamous failure (multiple failures, even) to build the high-speed rail they have been working on for years has a lot to do with that "high-speed rail is a boondoggle and a waste of taxpayer dollars" knee-jerk reaction that so many voters have.
Good luck reaching the good remote spots from a train.
Focusing on remote spots is largely a different topic. If the majority of driving was to remote spots then we'd have 90% less driving and cars wouldn't be a problem.
Honestly people really just dont understand how far apart things are. And yeah the good remote spots are a 4 hour drive from the city (and you aren’t even half way across the state at that point).
The forests and wilderness of the PNW are much, much, much, much more remote and wild than virtually anywhere you’d go in Europe. Like not even close.
It seems like people are just talking past each other here. The fact is that 99% of driving is not done by people in the process of visiting remote nature destinations.
Also, the USA is not the only big country in the world... I live in a small city in Patagonia. The nearest towns are 60 km, 90 km, and 480 km away. But you can still live without a car in the city.
they can't also realize a country that ditches personal vehicles can invest in buses or more trains to "remote places". nor they realize the vehicle industry is one of the biggest pollutants on micro-plastic; which screws the "remote nature" as well our health
Great so train to major destinations and then rent a car from there.
In the future, I hope this becomes a thing. As cars become more commodotised and self driving taxis can be ordered easily maybe there'll be competing mass fleets?
Or have a "car-cabin-without-engine-and-wheels" and treat it like a packet on a network of trains and "skateboard car platforms".
I believe Russians have something to say on that, though.
Is this satire? In the nordics we have allemansrätten, the right to use even private land to camp as long as you're not too close to where someone lives, not to mention huge national parks. In the US you have the right to get shot if you enter private land.
The average american mind can't comprehend this works out to a huge number of them having to commute by car 1-2 hours per day to get to work in some ungodly urban sprawl while living an alienated existence in crappy suburbs, and destroying the environment while doing so. At the same time working far more, slaving year round with laughable paid vacation time or sick day provisions, while being subjected to far worse homicide rates, and being treated as subjects by cops.
Such "freedom"...
No I love being stuck in traffic every day of the week for hours, its totally worth it because I can drive to an empty patch of grassland that no one wants to go to and there's nothing there. That's why cars are so amazing and freedom granting. Trains can't take you to the middle of nowhere to do nothing for the 1% of the time you don't want to be near other civilization so cars are better
lol, yeah. Meanwhile they can't even comprehend that it's a false dillema: Europeans have cars just fine, even several per family.
They just don't have to use them all the time since they can take the more efficient public transport, and they can buy one after college even, they don't need to drive one from 16 yo just to be able to get around...
Are you arguing that trains are infeasible (due to cost or duration) for certain trips?
I'm curious how this changes (in your mind) if "trains" can be expanded to "trains, buses, bicycle", or if you consider that to be a separate discussion.
I live in Atlanta.
The Atlanta Metro has 6.5 million people across TWENTY THOUSAND square kilometers.
Trains just don't make sense for this. Everything is too spread out. And that's okay. Cites are allowed to have different models of transportation and living.
I like how much road infra we have. That I can visit forests, rivers, mountains, and dense city all within a relatively short amount of time with complete flexibility.
Autonomous driving is going to make this paradise. Cars will be superior to trains when they drive themselves.
Trains lack privacy and personal space.
The German metro area "Rheinland" has a population of 8.7 million people across 12 thousand square kilometers. ~700/sqkm vs the 240/sqkm population density of Atlanta metro. Train and metro travel in this metrk area is extremely convenient and fast. It's not that Atlanta (or anywhere else in the United States for that matter) couldn't do it because of vastness, there's just no political and societal will behind this idea. In a society that glamorizes everyone driving the biggest trucks and carrying the largest rifles, of course convenient train systems are "not feasible".
> The German metro area "Rheinland" has a population of 8.7 million people across 12 thousand square kilometers. ~700/sqkm vs the 240/sqkm population density of Atlanta metro. Train and metro travel in this metrk area is extremely convenient and fast. It's not that Atlanta (or anywhere else in the United States for that matter) couldn't do it because of vastness
Did you forget to support yourself? You're saying Rheinland has three times the population density of Atlanta, with convenient passenger rail, and that demonstrates that low population density isn't an obstacle to passenger rail in Atlanta?
I'm not following your logic. Having nearly triple the population density in Rheinland makes trains way _more_ feasible, not _less_. That means on average you have a train 1/3 the distance away from you. That's a big difference.
I live in NYC which has 29,000/sqkm in Manhattan and 11,300/sqkm overall. Public transportation is great here and you don't need a car.
but at 240/sqkm, that's really not much public trans per person!
Rule 35 of the internet? Every discussion will eventually devolve into the United State's horrible usage (or lack thereof) of public transportation.
And it loses money. And doesn't it have time reliability issues?
The exact same comment could be made of Atlanta's roads.
How did we get here from the post about uv?
This did veer very far from uv!
I'm so stoked for what uv is doing for the Python ecosystem. requirements.txt and the madness around it has been a hell for over a decade. It's been so pointlessly hard to replicate what the authors of Python projects want the state of your software to be in.
uv has been much needed. It's solving the single biggest pain point for Python.
roads also lose a lot of money, and that's fine. Public infrasturcture doesn't need to make money
Is your car a profitable investment?
Public transport is to move people around, not to make money.
Having replied in good faith already, I also want to call out that your jab about trucks and rifles adds nothing to the conversation and is merely culture-war fuel.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
It seems like a fair point to me. You can't bring your rifle on the train but you can bring it in your truck. Whether or not that shapes Atlanteans choice of transport I can't say though.
Fair point perhaps, but was clearly intended as sarcasm:
> a society that glamorizes everyone driving the biggest trucks and carrying the largest rifles
Yep, driving in Atlanta is so great, historians write whole books about how bad the traffic is and what caused it:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traf...
> and how much it's going to cost
Depending how expensive is gasoline in your country, when using a car people underestimate the cost of a travel by a factor two to five, because they don't count the depreciation of their vehicle's value and the maintenance cost (and sometimes even insurance price) driven by the kilometers ridden during the trip.
By that logic cars work also turns into sometimes cars work. Ever heard of traffic jams and have you compared the number of fatal car accidents vs fatal train accidents. Not to mention the negative effect on air quality with many cars in dense cities. Cars main advantage is flexibility and that’s it. For times were the place and time usually stays the same like work, trains are a valid option.
I'll happily play your game with a bicycle.
Great lets pick Canada in January. Bring a shovel.
Don't need one in Toronto within a ½ day or so of the snow stopping for the major bicycle routes (including the MGT).
Calgary apparently also does a good job of clearing its bike lanes.
And I do my Costco shopping by bike year-round. I think I've used the car for large purchases at Costco twice in the last year.
I _rarely_ drive my car anywhere in Toronto, and find the streets on bike safer than most of the sidewalks in January -- they get plowed sooner than most homeowners and businesses clear the ice from their sidewalks.
And in Toronto we're rank amateurs at winter biking. Look at Montreal, Oslo, or Helsinki for even better examples. Too bad we've got a addle-brained carhead who doesn't understand public safety or doing his own provincial as our premier.
Just to add a less opinionated take: https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/why-winter-is-a-poor-arg...
Personally I've also biked to work (and everywhere, really) in sub-zero degrees many times, because the bicycle lanes are cleared and salted. It's really not too bad. It actually gets a bit too hot even, because you start out by wearing so much.
In cold weather, one should always dress for 5℃ warmer than the temperature outside when you have a bike longer than 5 km. Runners pretty much have to do the same. Your body heat and good layering will take care of everything else.
Personally I've also biked to work (and everywhere, really) in sub-zero degrees many times, because the bicycle lanes are cleared and salted.
I used to bike to work in just-above-freezing temperatures. That wasn't so bad.
The one time it started to rain mid-journey, that was bad.
They don't clear snow from cycle paths in Canada? If not then it's an infrastructure problem, not a weather problem.
Sound like a German saying :
> there’s no weather problems, there’s clothing problems
Love losing?
Really? This is your go-to argument? And nobody's pointed out to you before how bad it is? Well then.
Do the opposite thought experiment for me: Pick any two points of interest on the map and see how well connected they are with roads. Keep doing it until you find somewhere not accessible via car. See the issue yet?
We've paved over the entire planet to the point that you can get anywhere you'd like with a car. We have not done so whatsoever for any other mode of transportation. Pedestrian walkways come close but we prioritize vehicles over those too. The investment into public transport & cycling infrastructure is a statistical error in comparison to roadways.
So no shit it's more convenient for you to take a car than a train, that's the entire point―it shouldn't be.
A 20 lane highway should be a train track, intra-city roads should be dedicated to bikes, not cars.
skill issue
People in Europe spents years with people dying due to heat stress before they discovered ACs....
This isn't really true. Heat stress deaths in Europe are comparitively rare, or were until urbanization and climate change became bigger factors.
I mean, more Europeans die from heat issues than Americans from guns. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/28/opinion-us-heat-de...
> This content is not available in your region
I guess Europeans will never find out how great the US is :-)
Good article, thanks (I've actually read it before, but forgot the overall stats).
Urbanisation.
python uv
They still do. More Europeans die every year from heat-related injuries than Americans do from guns.
I've wanted an AC, but I cannot get one. This apartment is just not equipped for it, it literally cannot handle multiple ACs (the cables are old, yadda yadda).
And you have to get lots of permits to have an AC installed legally. If you do not have a permit, you will have to pay a really hefty fee when the inspectors come.
So yeah, buying an AC is what most people would do, but they do not because of the damn permits they most likely will not get. It is a shitty situation.
Spaniard here. Don't lecture Southern Europeans on surviving heat when the church of the village of my parents predates America itself (and it's pretty fresh inside in Summer).
Always sucks when you're arguing with someone and it turns out the buildings in their town are older than yours. Sometimes you just gotta take the L.
This is not people’s fault individually, but rather in aggregate (ie government). The places that have good train infrastructure that is legitimately an alternative to driving are very few and far between in the US. It’s just not an option for most people. And people can’t just all move to the places where it is an option, because housing and jobs are already strained in those places negating many of the benefits.
Have you considered that the repeated attempts to reinvent what's basically trains are not, in fact, evidence that people don't know about trains, but evidence that people like the advantages of trains but that the downsides suck so bad that people will pay literally tens of thousands of dollars a year to avoid them?
Yeah all you need to do is raze and rebuild every city in America and it will work great!
Well, there is precedent...
Wrong kind of cheek my friend
People in Europe spent years walking to the store everyday for food until they discovered that mechanical refrigeration exists...
Something I think that goes underappreciated: in many parts of the world, the food supply chain is shorter and the food is fresher to begin with. You're not meant to shop for 14 days at a time; you're meant to go more frequently and get what you need, fresh.
Bad example. Walking to the store everyday for fresh food would be a drastic improvement for most Americans.
The refrigerator is a relatively modern invention. There's always been a refrigerator for me, but as a child my mother sometimes stayed with people who didn't own one and for her mother they were a new invention many people didn't have.
Actually this idea of just buying things at "the store" is relatively new too. Historically people would make more things themselves, and more food would be purchased directly from farmers who had grown it.