Bicycle grocery shopping, part 2...

So, in a previous post, several commenters made helpful suggestions about bicycle trailers. Which are kinda cool and all, but I'll probably never use one for shopping. (It might not hurt to have one on hand for "just-in-case" purposes, although it'll probably be hard to get enough air to pedal through the post-EMPocalyptic wilderness with a colander on my face.)

I like my bicycle so much, not for the exercise or for the massive cloud of smug it emits to blanket the Prii and clapped out Volvo 240 diesels with their ass ends plastered in "Free Tibet!" stickers in the grocery store parking lot, but for the convenience.

Those who live in the 'burbs or the country will find this hard to believe, but it's probably just as quick, and less hassle, to use the bike to run to the store when you have two grocery stores less than a mile from the house. It's like this:

• Car: Get in car. Start car. Open garage door. Fiddle with stereo or iPod controls. Back out. Close garage door. Fasten belt. Diddle with HVAC controls while inching down cratered gravel/mud alley to street. Do I take the main street, which involves pulling into traffic and some traffic lights and possibly congestion at the far end, or the side street that involves alertly dodging potholes and stopping every tenth of a mile at a 4-way? Find parking space. Et cetera...
• Bike: Open garage door, hop on bike, and close garage door. Pedal a mile on flat, shaded side streets. Lock bike to rack at store.

Seriously, unless it's raining or experiencing some godawful temperature extreme it's probably just as fast and just as comfortable to take the bike; thanks to stop signs and road conditions the car never makes up in speed what the bike has in hop-on-and-hop-off convenience at both ends (although if you add another half-mile or two, that changes.) Adding a trailer to the equation would really put a dent in the whole "convenience" factor of the bike and I might as well just take the car. Is this making sense?