Are you saying it's closer? Or do you refer to using time instead of distance?
Even if you live in a city, getting to a hardware store usually takes at least 15 minutes unless you really live like right next door. Usually takes longer. Distance is a bad measure of the time it takes.
One can easily overestimate how fast walking and taking public transportation is and how close hardware stores are to people, and underestimate how fast cars are.
As a real world example you can consider this:
From a small village called Luvia, Finland, it takes 18 minutes to drive 19 km to a general purpose hardware store (K-Rauta Pori), while it can take easily 30 min to an hour to traverse this on foot from Pori city center (ie carrying everything yourself), or at least 16 minutes if you conveniently live right next to a bus stop (and there's absolutely not just a few minutes between rides).
Even if you live in a city, getting to a hardware store usually takes at least 15 minutes unless you really live like right next door. Usually takes longer. Distance is a bad measure of the time it takes.
One can easily overestimate how fast walking and taking public transportation is and how close hardware stores are to people, and underestimate how fast cars are.
As a real world example you can consider this:
From a small village called Luvia, Finland, it takes 18 minutes to drive 19 km to a general purpose hardware store (K-Rauta Pori), while it can take easily 30 min to an hour to traverse this on foot from Pori city center (ie carrying everything yourself), or at least 16 minutes if you conveniently live right next to a bus stop (and there's absolutely not just a few minutes between rides).