Back in Việt Nam I could pick the ripe ones in the market, but since I moved to South Korea, they are hard as rocks. I often have to buy tomatoes a week or two in advance and wonder about your situation. Some are too green and refuse to ripen even after a month.
Cherry tomatoes are still good, though not suitable for finer sauces that require peeling.
there are a LOT of varieties of tomatoes and each community has different tastes and expectations (as a rough generalization, Koreans turn to cherry tomatoes as the go-to snack when dieting the same way Americans turn to iceberg lettuce or celery)
but to expand on @poVoq’s point – I see the main emphasis on transport show up when a community switches from market shopping to supermarket shopping – when the emphasis switches from seeing what came in that morning versus stocking up for the week ahead, your emphasis on produce switches from cooking the ingredient that night to needing it to survive stuffed into a plastic bag in the back of the fridge for a week …
