How Much Will You Save on Groceries by Joining Costco?
Last updated November 2022
For some food shopping, Costco offers a low-cost alternative to supermarkets. The warehouse club carried few if any of the items in our market basket in the usual sizes, but when we looked for the same brands regardless of size, we found Costco stocked 37 percent of our market basket items.
The figure below indicates how much Costco could save you. Since the warehouse club stocked so few items in the sizes of our basic market basket, we looked for items of any size, so long as they were the same brands. We then used unit prices (for example, price per pound) to calculate Costco’s prices for amounts specified in the market basket. After this adjustment, we compared the prices of items at Costco with prices for the same brands at several other stores. Bear in mind that this is not an “apples-to-apples” comparison—the sizes of the items priced at Costco were usually larger than the sizes of the items priced at the other stores—so Costco enjoys an advantage in such a comparison.
Costco offers significant savings for most shoppers. For example, it beat QFC’s prices by a whopping 32 percent and was 31 percent less expensive than Albertsons. While Costco offered significant savings compared to all the other local grocery store options, shopping there will net you savings of only three or four percent compared to what you’d pay at Walmart or WinCo, which don’t charge annual fees.
In addition to having low prices, Costco received very high customer ratings for the quality of its meat and above-average scores for overall quality.
While Costco offered significant savings compared to prices offered at grocery stores, these savings perhaps aren’t enough to justify paying the club’s annual membership fee if you don’t use it often. And if half of what you buy is wasted due to spoilage, you won’t save by buying in bulk.
