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My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:
- insane amounts of empty space. It's one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn't count as "far away", another to experience it.
- guns. Not like in "them americans only shoot themselves", but like in "any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it's normal" wtf mates, you can't keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
- malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don't get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain "hey let's put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here"?
- And a very specific nitpick: calling places "european" like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being "the most europe-like cities in north america" and... they're not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that's it.
Corner shops used to exist in small towns, but they were killed by malls, big box stores, and online shopping.
And car-centric infrastructure. It's dumb to drive somewhere for a single shop, so people wanted an excuse to drive their expensive cars. Hence the one stop mega mall, where you can find everything you could want to load your car up with.
Canada is huge . and their cities are mainly built on flat ground hence the spaciousness. Add to that the dependency on cars. And you get huge swaths of unwalkable cities.
When it comes to the absence of corner shops. Its mainly due to strict urban zoning. Where they don't mix commercial and residential activities