On the one hand, I’m always up for making fun of New Yorkers. On the other hand, every city I’ve actually been to has zoned corner stores out of existence – apart from gas station kiosks, I literally have not seen a residential corner store in twenty years – so I kind of get the romanticising bodegas thing.
where do you people buy milk I am so confused by American lifestyles
I’m Canadian, but to answer your question, when you live in a city that doesn’t allow (or no longer allows) mixed residential-commercial zoning, and you need some trivial article you can’t buy at a gas station kiosk, you drive to the nearest grocery store – which may be kilometres away – for every little thing. This is considered normal.
(For my part, I went to a great deal of trouble to find housing right on the border between a residential zone and a commercial zone, because I don’t drive, and living next to a highway is worth having a grocery store in easy walking distance!)
To be 100% fair, there’s also been a recent-ish move to reintroduce mixed residential/commercial neighbourhoods in the form of apartment buildings with shops on the ground floor. In practice, however, the owners almost invariably set the ground-floor rent far too high for convenience stores, so you end up with shit like an apartment building whose ground-floor shops consist of eight different orthodontists’ offices. Which is great if you need a lot of dental work, I suppose!