Which Grocery Stores Offer the Best Prices?
Last updated November 2022
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Our ratings of grocery chains and stores report how each stacks up for price and quality. To compare prices, our researchers used a market basket of 150+ common items to shop grocery-store options in seven metro areas (the Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. areas). To evaluate stores on quality of products and service, we surveyed area consumers.
Here’s a rundown of the results:
Food Lion, Grocery Outlet, Meijer, Price Rite, Walmart, and WinCo win for price.
Our shoppers found these discounters consistently offered very low prices compared to the average prices at the stores we surveyed, typically 12 to 30 percent below the all-store average in each area. For a family that spends $250 per week at the supermarket, a 10 percent price difference totals $1,300 per year; a 15 percent price difference totals $1,9500 per year; and a 25 percent difference adds up to $3,250.
Other price standouts include FoodMaxx, Foods Co., Fred Meyer, Fresh Thyme, Grocery Outlet, Hannaford, Mariano’s, Market Basket, Smart & Final, Sprouts, Woodman’s and, in some markets, Target.
Some Target stores charge higher prices for produce.
Several of the Target locations we shopped had significantly higher prices for produce than most of its competitors. In general, we found that the Target stores around the U.S. that lack scales at checkout, and therefore price produce per piece or package, offer undersized items relative to their price tags. (At Target and other stores that price produce per piece, we used our own scales to weigh items to convert costs to price per pound.)
Most large, traditional supermarket chains get low marks from their customers—and don’t offer impressive prices, either.
In our surveys of consumers, most of the largest chains in the seven metro areas we studied were rated poorly for quality of products and service. Acme, Albertsons, Cub, FoodMaxx, Giant (Washington area), Jewel-Osco, Lucky, Safeway, Shaw's, Shoppers Food, and Stop & Shop were each rated "superior" overall by fewer than half of their surveyed customers.
Many of the price winners also earned very poor ratings from their customers
Food Lion, Grocery Outlet, Price Rite, Target, Walmart, and WinCo received dismal reviews from their surveyed customers.
Whole Foods remains an expensive choice—and its ratings for quality continue to dip.
When Amazon purchased Whole Foods in 2017, many consumers were excited by the prospect of paying Amazon-like prices for Whole Foods-quality products. That hasn’t happened.
Whole Foods built a loyal following by offering high-quality produce, meat, prepared foods, and generic staples, and has always earned high marks in our surveys of consumers, especially for produce and meat quality. While Whole Foods’ customers continue to rate it fairly highly, on our “overall quality” survey question its ratings have dropped significantly.
Our price survey found that Whole Foods remains among the most expensive among the big chains we shopped in each of the seven metro areas.
A handful of smaller local and regional chains offer high-quality products and service—without imposing a big price penalty.
In many of the seven metro areas we studied, there are one or two regional or local chains that are fan favorites for offering high-quality products and service at reasonable or low prices. For example, in the Boston area, Market Basket offers low prices and received high overall ratings from its customers. In the Chicago area, shoppers love the quality of produce and meat at Mariano's, which charges lower prices than Jewel-Osco, Meijer, and several other big chains. And we found Woodman’s offers very low prices and received high overall ratings from its customers. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Fresh Thyme Farmers market offers low prices and gets above-average ratings from its customers, and Hy-Vee earns very high ratings and offers prices that are lower than Cub’s.
In the Boston, Philadalphia, and Washington, D.C., areas, Wegmans for several years has consistently earned very high ratings from its customers for quality. In our last survey, Wegmans charged prices that were lower than traditional chains like Acme, Giant, Safeway, Shaw's, ShopRite, and Stop & Shop. But this time, for the Boston and Philadelphia areas, Wegmans was one of the most expensive grocery options, and had prices that were slightly higher than average in the Washington, D.C., area.
But in some cities, you can’t have it all.
In the San Francisco and Seattle areas, we found that the stores that offer the lowest prices don’t receive the highest ratings from their surveyed customers.
Whole Foods’ Amazon Prime discounts don’t add up to much.
Like most other grocery stores, Whole Foods uses “loss leaders”—widely advertised discounts on a small number of items—to draw customers into stores (when calculating our price comparison scores, we include sale prices). But with Whole Foods, there’s a twist: At checkout, Amazon Prime members can automatically get an extra 10 percent off items that are on sale, plus special “Prime Member Deals” for a small number of other weekly special items.
If you shop at Whole Foods often, the 10 percent bonus discount for on-sale items is a nice little benefit—although it’s unlikely many shoppers will rack up enough savings to cover the annual fee for Prime ($139/year or $14.99/month).
Sometimes Amazon/Whole Foods’ Prime Member Deals are designed to garner a lot of attention. For example, for Valentine’s Day the company has hyped that Prime members can buy two dozen roses for $19.99, instead of $24.99. But because Whole Foods and Amazon offer so few of these discounts (usually it’s only two or three items per week), they won’t save most shoppers much money overall.