Wikipedia says St Louis had 353k inhabitants; how can a city of that size not have grocery store? Not all of them could be eating out every single meal? Or is this for some specific definition of 'grocery store'?
The parent comment is referring to downtown in particular - of course the city has grocery stores, but many cities have few or no grocery options in the central business district, as suburbia sucked the life from downtown in the 80's and 90's.
A lot of people aren't very conscious about this kind of a decision and are used to a lifestyle of driving multiple miles before getting to a grocery store.
I must admit I don't know what it is like to live like that. Maybe if you only go shopping once a week (or even just every two weeks), it is not too bad.
I actually live about 1/2 mile from a great grocery store but regularly (~once per week) drive 2.5 miles to the greatest grocery store. It's not so bad. It's even easier to go that far or farther for people in the suburbs with fast roads or highways that go to their neighborhood-ish grocery store, rather than my town of Berkeley which has weird traffic calming patterns to try to actively discourage me from driving to the Berkeley Bowl West.
