I live in an area that has probably >100% pick-up ownership per adult male. I've noticed that these people will not go to the grocery store on days when the weather is inclement due to the chance of the groceries getting wet. Seems like a bad vehicle for grocery runs.
I don't get the whole American thing for Pick-up trucks. Unless you're hauling hay or manure, why would you want your cargo area exposed to the elements?
I used to work for a general contractor who did residential remodels and construction, and a little bit of commercial work. He exclusively used cargo vans. He would carpet the interior to protect the cargo and your knees. It made me question why anyone would use a truck. As you alluded to, it doesn't just protect from the elements, but also from thieves stealing tools out of the back of your truck.
Van's aren't sexy and cool, and there is no marketing as TOUGH and REAL MEN and COUNTRY MUSIC the way there is for trucks.
The bourgeoning Van Life movement that is picking up steam on places like TikTok and YT may do more for that, but in a lot of ways it's a statement about doing without, as opposed to being country rich and tough the way trucks are.
You are forgetting "soccer moms". For some dumb reason America decided there were two genders "masculine" trucks and "feminine" vans. It still makes no sense, but it certainly seemed to sell a lot of trucks to misogynists.
I always find this talking point so weird. Trucks are great and people want them. There is no ultimate truth here where people can't see the light and evil corporations are making us buy trucks. Theyre making trucks because we want them. I love mine, and admittedly don't really "need" it.
This is a fun reply because the easy flippant response is "okay then the propaganda got you." Something neither of us can prove or refute.
Pickup trucks are popular in the US and the Americas broadly where they are heavily marketed. Pickup trucks are less popular in places where they are not marketed as heavily. Even outside the auto industry, there is a general consensus that marketing works. Make of that observation what you will.
I mean I don’t doubt that marketing has some positive return for anyone selling something. But are they marketing me to buy a truck or to buy their truck. There’s a huge distinction.
Pick-up trucks aren't meant for work. Like, at all. They are inherently grocery/family vehicles.
Europeans don't use pick-up trucks even for cargo that is suitable for pickup trucks, because small flatbed trucks [0] let you open the bed from the side, making pickup trucks mostly an obsolete concept for work purposes.
I agree that they probably don't serve most people well.
But I know someone that has a huge truck with a cap on his bed (google "pickup truck bed cap" or "topper"). That solves the weather problem and makes you wonder why you don't see more trucks covered up. The answer is obviously it looks less cool and doesn't fit the image. But it serves him well because he works in construction and frequently has the bed full of materials, sometimes which are longer than the bed. And he uses the truck occasionally to tow trailers.
But he's not most people. And he has another car for getting around town when he's not working.
I don't have a full sized truck, but I do have a Tacoma (similar to the Hilux iirc for Europeans). The main reason I got it was because Toyota is well known for cars that last forever, but also to tow a camper and to do some offroad exploring and camping. It has also come in handy for helping move stuff for friends, I recently used it to carry a bunch of bags of sand and dirt for a friend. The utility it offers has come in handy compared to my old Ford Escape.
When I was a kid, my dad owned a pickup truck in Mississippi, and there seem to be tons of ways of avoiding getting the groceries wet, a bed-width toolbox behind the cab was the simplest way (and this was way before extended cabs were a thing).
If you are living in such an area where they can't even figure that kind of thing out, it sounds like there might be something in the water.
When I was a kid, a normal-sized American adult could open up a bed-width toolbox, look down inside of it, and easily remove a few bags of groceries before re-closing the lid -- all while standing flat-footed on the ground beside their normal-sized American truck.
Things are not that way anymore; trucks got bigger.
The top of the bed rail of an F150 Lightning is around chin height for a lot of folks: https://imgur.com/ZBOBqJc
Oh, I was a smaller kid back then and I guess I wouldn’t find it very accessible either way. Also my dad was tall. Coolers fit in the back also if you want to use those instead.
> I've noticed that these people will not go to the grocery store on days when the weather is inclement due to the chance of the groceries getting wet.
A modern pickup truck can fit the payload capacity of an entire Honda civic in the back of the cab. I've never seen someone put sacks of groceries in the bed of their truck. Maybe packs of water or charcoal, but no one is putting their produce and boxed goods back there.
Yea… you can actually fit two adult-sized road bicycles, without removing the wheels or disassembling them in any way, in the back of an F-150 cab!
And still have more room for stuff in the back of the cab before you even start talking about the bed.
I’m also confused how groceries in the bed would get wet in the rain… everyone around me has a tonneau on the bed. My guess is that some of these are not real anecdotes.
I see it, at least weekly, at a Costco in Texas. Not just the pallet stuff but refrigerated goods and smaller stuff (gathered in boxes as is the custom at Costco)
Wait do people put their groceries they intend to eat on the bed of their trucks, exposed to exhaust, asphalt, tire rubber and all other forms of road pollution?
I am, but still it sounds bad to me to expose them to the road elements on the way home.
And food in packaging, it is usually in boxes or other containers most of the time in supply line transit. Individual items only get unpacked in the store, so I would think this practice adds considerably to their “dirtyness”.
Not really. Bread, milk, soft drinks, and bagged snacks like potato chips all get delivered and stocked by the individual vendors, but everything else goes through a single warehouse ran by the grocery franchiser. Dairy comes in extra boxes, but most of the stuff is stacked 3D-tetris-style 6 feet high on a pallet and then wrapped in cellophane on the pallet before getting loaded on the truck. It's used just as a convenient way to bind the stack together so it doesn't dump in traffic. When it gets to the store, the pallets sit in the back until they are needed and then the cellophane is cut off and the items go directly on the shelves. Packing them up further would slow things down too much and confuse the stock workers too much (it's mostly teenagers and mentally challenged people, not exactly a life long career). It was not uncommon to find rat and mouse feces and urine on top of cans and boxes.
Almost all of the produce is in nearly the exact form at the warehouse as you would find them in the store. For example, watermelons are in an open-topped, cardboard bin that just gets moved from the warehouse to the grocery floor in exactly its final state. Berries are all in their plastic clamshell boxes, no extra packing, no tape. They rack them up in flat cardboard boxes with no top, just tall enough that a single layer of berry boxes can fit in it and the next layer stacks on top.
This one time, one of the pickers had a pallet full of berry racks, six feet tall. He took a corner with his pallet jack too fast and dumped the entire load on the floor. Berries scattered everywhere. They used a snow shovel to scoop them back up and back into the boxes and back into the racks. Then out to the truck and out to the store, where they would have gotten relabeled "mixed berries."
Almost everything from a grocery store starts in, or ends up, in a water resistant package. There are a handful of exceptions like eggs in cardboard casing, but you can just wrap them in a baggy to solve that. For that matter, unless it's like an insanely torrential downpour, very little, if any, water is going to get through a closed bag.
If your observation is accurate, the more likely reason is that people just don't like going out when it's raining. Getting your shoes/pants wet sucks, getting your car (or truck) seats wet sucks, rain traffic sucks, there's more crashes - which suck, and by contrast you could just be sitting at home enjoying the relaxing sounds of rain, which doesn't suck.
