Grocery Prices Compared: Walmart, Great; Safeway, Terrible; Whole Foods Near the Bottom

Trader Joe’s prices are also great, but based on everyday prices on items they both sell, Safeway is even more expensive than Whole Foods

Image by Ulrich Dregler from Pixabay

By David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)

Near where I live in the SF Bay Area a Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Walmart and an upscale independent market are all within about a mile of each other.

I decided to compare prices of a bit more than twenty standard items across the five stores. I could have chosen twenty or even forty additional items, but I don’t know if that would have materially improved the results and it certainly would have doubled or tripled the time and effort involved.

I tried to exercise common sense in making this study.

In this post I’m trying to give a general overview of prices. I can’t guarantee that there aren’t errors in the numbers I recorded. Use them as a guideline, not as a scientific fact. Also, prices change all the time.

My Focus On The Fundamentals

The prices for basics — Milk, Bread, Coffee, Beef, Potatoes, Onions, Flour & Fruit tell the story. Adding together the prices for these items for each store we get the following totals — — — %age Of Safeway Cost

Trader Joe’s: — — — — -$23.99…………54%………186% Safeway Higher %age

Walmart: — — — — — — $27.05……..…60.5%…….165% Safeway Higher %age

Whole Foods: — — — — $34.54………..77%……….129% Safeway Higher %age

Independent Market: $39.99…………90%……….112% Safeway Higher %age

Safeway: — — — — — — -$44.65

What I Did — Not All Stores Sold All Items

This survey is based on my checking the items at one of each brand of store. Inventory will, of course, differ between different stores of the same brand.

The fact that this Safeway did not sell organic yellow onions or offer a house brand of kettle chips doesn’t mean that some other Safeway might stock those items.

Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods had house brands of jam but did not sell Smuckers strawberry jam while the independent market sold Smuckers but did not stock a house-brand strawberry jam.

Every market sold bananas and milk, though Walmart and Whole Foods sold milk by the half gallon so I divided their prices by 2 to get the quart price.

Trader Joe’s, the independent market, and Whole Foods did not sell Ball Park hot dogs while the independent market had them but did not have a house brand of hot dogs.

Whole foods only had two varieties of house-brand condensed soup, neither of which were tomato. Nevertheless I used the Whole Foods condensed soup price in the “generic tomato” condensed-soup category.

I used the price per pound of the cheapest French Roast coffee beans available in each store irrespective of brand.

I divided the price for some items, e.g. coffee beans, by the quantity to get a per-ounce or a per pound price.

I ignored any short-term sale prices and instead used the everyday prices for each item.

In most cases I rounded the price to the next cent. For example, the Walmart coffee beans were $.608/ounce which I rounded to $.61/ounce.

Ketchup turned out to be about 10½ cents or 12½ cents per ounce so I left the third digit in the chart for those items.

Brand Substitution

If the store did not have a particular brand, for example Oroweat hot dog buns, but it did have another major name brand, for example Ball Park hot dog buns, I used the Ball Park price in the table for that store.

A Note About Safeway’s Pricing Strategy

Safeway consistently had either the highest or second highest prices, but it offered many special sale prices.

I did not use sale prices because they might be gone tomorrow, and the purpose here is to give people a general idea of the overall, general, everyday pricing differences for ALL shoppers between the store brands.

Digital Sale Prices At Safeway

Safeway tags many items with a cheaper “Member Price” and often below that with an even cheaper “Digital Discount Price.”

Safeway club-card shoppers get the “Member Price” but they do NOT get the even cheaper “Digital Discount Price” unless they first log in to the Safeway website, find the sale item there, then click on it to add it to their Safeway Club card account.

So, unless you

• (1) made a careful shopping list in advance, then visited the Safeway website and clicked on the sale offers for items on your list in order to add those lower sale prices to your club card, OR
• (2) kept the Safeway website open on your phone as you shopped and every time you found one of the “digital discount” items you wanted to buy you then located it on Safeway’s web page and then tapped it’s icon on your phone to add that discounted price to your Club Card

at checkout Safeway is going to charge you the regular price or the Member Price but not the posted digital discount price that the tag at the shelf might have seemed to promise you.

None of the other grocery stores limited access to any sale prices to only those shoppers who first manually selected each shelf-marked sale item on the store’s website.

A benefit to Safeway to this marketing strategy is that the quantity of digitally discounted items actually sold at the very attractive lower price will be far less than the would be the case if the discount was available to all shoppers or at least to all Club Card shoppers, thus having the sale tags on the shelf make the prices seem lower while not actually having to sell as many units at that lower price.

You can decide for yourself if you think that Safeway’s digital sale-price mechanism is an honest marketing tactic.

Some Observations About Brand Items

Heinz Ketchup

The independent market had the highest price, $.31/oz followed by Safeway at $.30/oz.

Walmart’s price was $.124/oz for Heinz ketchup which means that if you purchased Heinz ketchup at Safeway you paid 242% more for it than you would have paid it had bought it at Walmart.

If you purchased Safeway’s house-brand ketchup instead of Walmart’s house-brand ketchup, you paid a 250% higher price per ounce.

Note that Safeway’s house-brand ketchup was also 192% more expensive per ounce (almost twice as much) as Trader Joe’s.

Campbell’s Soup

At Safeway, Campbell’s soup was 143% more expensive that if purchased at Walmart.

Smucker’s Jam

Smucker’s Strawberry jam was 145% more expensive at Safeway than at Walmart.

Produce, Dairy, Meat

Bananas at Safeway were 183% more expensive than at Walmart and 430% more expensive than bananas purchased at Trader Joe’s.

Yellow potatoes were 293% more expensive at Safeway than at Walmart and 315% more expensive at Safeway than at Trader Joe’s.

Hamburger was 139% more expensive at Safeway than at Walmart and 169% more expensive at Safeway than at Trader Joe’s.

Chuck roast was about 190% more expensive at Safeway than at Walmart and 200% more expensive at Safeway than at Trader Joe’s.

Milk was 135% more expensive at Safeway than at Walmart and 112% more expensive than milk purchased at Trader Joe’s.

Some Overall Comparisons

I added the total regular prices (not sale prices) for all the items that Safeway and each of other stores both offered.

Safeway vs. Walmart On All In Common Items

Safeway: $86.57 Walmart: $57.76

On these in-common items Safeway was about 150% more expensive in its everyday prices than Walmart. 165% more on the basic items.

If you spent $100 on these groceries at Walmart they could cost you about $150 at Safeway.

Safeway vs. Trader Joe’s On All In Common Items

I did the same thing with Safeway vs. Trader Joe’s. Note that there are far fewer in-common products that both markets sell.

Safeway: $62.31 Trader Joe’s: $39.28

On these products that both chains sell, Safeway is about 159% more expensive than Trader Joe’s for those in common items and 186% more on the basic items.

$100 worth of these groceries at Trader Joe’s could cost you about $159 at Safeway.

Safeway vs. Whole Foods On All In Common Items

I did the same thing with Safeway vs. Whole Foods. Note that there are fewer products that both markets sell.

Safeway: $65.79 Whole Foods: $59.20

On these products that both chains sell, Safeway is about 111% more expensive than Whole Foods and 129% more on the basic items.

$100 worth of these groceries purchased at Whole Foods could cost you about $111 at Safeway.

Safeway vs. the upscale independent market On All In Common Items

Safeway: $77.79 Independent Market: $75.08

On the products both stores sell, Safeway is about three and a half percent more expensive than the upscale independent market, a difference that is so small that a slight variation in the shopping list combined with Safeway’s sale coupons could give you a better price at Safeway.

Using Coupons To Spend Less

Please note that someone who very carefully shops at Safeway and only buys on-sale items and who spends the time and effort to access the on-line coupons on the Safeway website will be able to materially reduce their cost of groceries over the amounts in the table below, PROVIDED that the shopper is willing to forego purchasing items that are not on sale.

If you need Campbell’s soup or Heinz ketchup or ground beef or yellow potatoes or whole milk or any of the thousands of products that Safeway has NOT put on sale the day you shop, then you may well pay more if you shop at Safeway than at Walmart or Trader Joe’s.

I didn’t perform this comparison at my local Grocery Outlet, but I suspect that its prices would be similar to Walmart or Trader Joe’s.

Some General Thoughts

In Northern California, Safeway commands over 21% of the grocery market and Walmart holds a bit over 8%.

Safeway is certainly able to take advantage of the economies of scale and obtain the lowest available prices on bulk purchases of national brands like Campbell’s soup, Smucker’s jam, Heinz ketchup and the like.

One wonders why a can of Campbell’s soup is 143% is more expensive at Safeway and a jar of Smucker’s jam is 125% more expensive at Safeway and a pound yellow potatoes is 293% more expensive at Safeway than at Walmart.

My opinion is that Safeway is able to charge higher prices because of

• greater geographical coverage (more stores closer to more people),
• the shopping experience (Walmart is often crowded),
• lazy shoppers who don’t pay attention to prices,
• more major brands at Safeway than Trader Joe’s or Grocery Outlet, and
• established consumer habits, people are just used to going to the Safeway near their home.

More smaller Safeway stores could also mean more overhead costs for Safeway than for Walmart with only one huge store that sells other products whose profit can contribute to covering the store’s overhead.

But that overhead issue does not explain how Trader Joe’s (and I suspect Grocery Outlet), which also have a large number of smaller stores, are able to profitably price their products materially cheaper than Safeway.

Nor does it explain why Safeway was

• the second most expensive store for milk,
• tied for most expensive for bananas,
• most expensive for potatoes,
• most expensive for onions,
• second most expensive for coffee beans,
• tied for most expensive for hamburger,
• most expensive for chuck roast,
• second most expensive for sandwich bread,
• tied for most expensive for lemons and
• in the middle for flour.

— David Grace (Amazon Page — David Grace Website)

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