The Cheapest Grocery Store in America: 34 Chains Ranked
Where you shop moves your grocery bill more than anything else you do inside the store. More than coupons, more than store brands, more than any tactic I have written about here.
Consumer Reports commissioned Strategic Resource Group, a New York retail research firm, to price baskets of commonly purchased items at mainstream chains across six representative US cities. They used Walmart as the baseline and measured everyone else against it.
The spread between the cheapest and most expensive basket in each city was more than 33 percent. Add warehouse clubs and specialty grocers and it widens further.
Here is the whole ranking.
The ranking
| Chain | vs Walmart |
|---|---|
| Costco Wholesale | −21.4% |
| BJ’s Wholesale Club | −21.0% |
| Lidl | −8.5% |
| Aldi | −8.3% |
| WinCo | −3.3% |
| H-E-B | −0.2% |
| Walmart | baseline |
| Market Basket | +1.2% |
| Target | +5.9% |
| Wegmans | +7.6% |
| King Soopers | +7.9% |
| Safeway | +8.8% |
| Food 4 Less | +9.0% |
| Meijer | +9.9% |
| Food Lion | +12.5% |
| Hannaford | +13.2% |
| Kroger | +14.8% |
| Stater Bros. | +15.6% |
| Save A Lot | +19.3% |
| Publix | +20.3% |
| Fiesta | +21.7% |
| Ralphs | +21.9% |
| Stop & Shop | +22.2% |
| Piggly Wiggly | +22.6% |
| Harris Teeter | +23.5% |
| Trader Joe’s | +24.6% |
| Albertsons | +24.8% |
| Tom Thumb | +25.4% |
| Big Y | +26.2% |
| Vons | +26.6% |
| Mariano’s | +27.6% |
| Jewel-Osco | +29.7% |
| El Rancho | +30.1% |
| Shaw’s | +31.9% |
| Whole Foods | +39.7% |
Whole Foods to Costco is a gap of about 61 percentage points on the same basket.
Three things this table does not say
I want to handle the caveats before the conclusions, because this ranking is being passed around without them.
It is less reliable for private-label stores. The researchers noted that comparisons were more robust among retailers carrying national brands than among stores selling mostly private-label or specialty goods. That matters enormously for two names on this list.
Aldi and Trader Joe’s sell overwhelmingly their own products. You cannot price-match a Trader Joe’s item against a Walmart item when no equivalent exists, so the comparison has to substitute, and substitution introduces judgment. Trader Joe’s sitting at +24.6% may partly reflect that its basket could not be matched cleanly rather than that it charges a quarter more for the same food.
Treat Aldi’s −8.3% and Trader Joe’s +24.6% as the softest numbers in the table.
Costco’s figure excludes the membership. A Gold membership runs about $65 a year. That is roughly $5.40 a month you have to save before the discount starts being real. For a family doing a full shop, trivial. For one person buying small quantities, not trivial at all, and the bulk sizes make waste a genuine risk.
It varies by metro. Trader Joe’s ranked as the most expensive store in Denver, which is not where it lands nationally. Costco was consistently the most affordable across cities and Whole Foods consistently near the top, but the middle of this table moves depending on where you live.
What actually follows from it
The cheapest tier is warehouse clubs, if you can use them. Costco and BJ’s are both around 21 percent below Walmart, and no amount of coupon strategy at a Kroger closes a gap that size. The conditions are a membership fee, storage space, and a household that gets through bulk quantities before they spoil.
The second tier is hard discounters. Lidl and Aldi, both around 8 percent below Walmart, with no membership and no bulk requirement. For most households without a warehouse club, this is the realistic move.
Traditional supermarkets cost 15 to 25 percent more, and loyalty programs do not close that. Kroger at +14.8%, Publix at +20.3%, Albertsons at +24.8%. Digital coupons can beat those numbers on the specific items you target, which is exactly the problem: they work on the items the store chose to discount, not on your basket.
Whole Foods is a different category of decision. Nearly 40 percent above Walmart is not a shopping mistake, it is a purchase of something else. Whether that something is worth 40 percent is not a question a price table answers.
What I would actually do
Split your shop. Staples, cleaning products, and anything shelf-stable at the cheapest chain you can reach. Fresh items wherever is convenient. The savings live in the boring half of the cart, and that half does not care where it came from.
Check the membership arithmetic before joining a club. Estimate your monthly grocery spend, apply 21 percent, and compare against $5.40 a month. If your spend is under about $300 a month, the margin gets thin once waste is counted.
Do not switch stores for 3 percent. WinCo at −3.3% and H-E-B at −0.2% are effectively tied with Walmart. Driving further for those is a loss once you count fuel and time.
Track your own receipts for a month. This is the only answer that is actually about you. Take the same list to two stores and compare totals. A national average across six cities is a good starting hypothesis and a poor substitute for your own numbers, which is true of every figure I publish here.
The store you choose is a decision you make once and benefit from every week. Almost everything else in the frugal-shopping genre, including a fair amount of what I have written, is a decision you have to make over and over for smaller returns.
