Our price comparisons and ratings of stores for quality show the results of our market-basket price survey and our most recent surveys of consumers on supermarket quality and service. Here are some key findings— 

The area’s two largest chains—Giant and Safeway—had higher prices, on average, than most of the other surveyed chains. 

The area’s price standouts were Walmart Supercenter, Target, Bottom Dollar Food, Wegmans, Magruder’s, and Food Lion. 

Compared to average prices at Giant and Safeway, the prices we found were substantially lower at Walmart Supercenter (19 percent lower than the Giant/Safeway average), Target (15 percent lower), Bottom Dollar Food (14 percent lower), Wegmans (11 percent lower), Magruder’s (10 percent lower), and Food Lion (nine percent lower). For a family that spends $150 per week at the supermarket, a nine-to-19 percent price difference might be expected to total $700 to $1,500 during the course of a year. 

In addition to its low prices, Wegmans got top ratings for quality, while Giant and Safeway got relatively low ratings from their surveyed customers. 

Wegmans was by far the highest rated area supermarket chain in our survey of CHECKBOOK’s online subscribers. An astounding 94 percent of its surveyed customers rated it “superior” for “overall quality.” By comparison, only 30 percent of Giant’s surveyed customers and the same percentage of Safeway’s surveyed customers rated them “superior” overall. Wegmans also received very high ratings for all of our other survey questions, including “quality of fresh produce,” “quality of fresh meats,” and “helpfulness of staff.” 

Store locations of Wegmans and many of the other low-cost chains won’t be convenient for most area shoppers, but Target’s recent reconfiguration of many area stores to include groceries and planned future expansion in the area by Walmart and Wegmans will mean more Washington area shoppers will have low-cost supermarket options nearby. 

At the time of this writing, Wegmans was operating six area stores in Gainesville, Lanham, Leesburg, Fairfax, Sterling, and Woodbridge, with future expansion planned for Alexandria, Columbia, Crofton, Frederick, and Germantown. We particularly applaud Wegmans’ establishment of its new store in Lanham, finally giving Prince George’s County consumers a low-cost, top-quality supermarket alternative to Giant and Safeway. 

Walmart was operating only one of its Supercenters in the area, in Laurel, at the time of this writing (its “Supercenters” are those stores that offer full grocery departments). But Walmart has announced that in 2012 it will open four stores in the District with full grocery departments. 

Target’s recent reconfiguration of about 25 area stores to include a basic selection of groceries means many Washington area shoppers already have a low-cost supermarket option nearby. We found that these stores offer prices that are about the same as SuperTarget stores (which have full grocery departments), but the somewhat limited selection at the regular Target stores may mean you’ll have to supplement your shopping at one of these stores with visits to conventional supermarkets; the store we surveyed had in stock only about 60 percent of the items in our market basket. 

On average, Giant’s and Safeway’s prices were about the same. 

Within the Giant and Safeway chains, we found relatively little price variation from store to store. 

Harris Teeter continues to receive above-average ratings for quality from its customers while offering prices that are about the same as the prices at Giant and Safeway. 

The store we surveyed for Harris Teeter, which has become the area’s fourth-largest chain in terms of store count, had prices that were slightly lower than the Giant/Safeway average. This finding is the same we have seen each time we have surveyed Harris Teeter’s prices since the chain first came to the area. 

Despite matching Giant’s and Safeway’s average prices, Harris Teeter was rated much higher than those two chains on our survey of customers. The Harris Teeter chain received “superior” ratings for “overall quality” from 73 percent of its surveyed customers—compared to 30 percent for Giant and Safeway. Harris Teeter also received considerably higher scores than Giant or Safeway for “quality of fresh produce,” “quality of meats,” “staff helpfulness/pleasantness,” and all of the other questions we asked on our survey. 

Prices at Shoppers Food Warehouse, the third-largest chain in the area, were somewhat lower than prices at Giant and Safeway—not nearly as big a price edge as Shoppers has had in the past. 

The Shoppers store we surveyed had prices about four percent lower than the Giant/Safeway average. This is a much smaller price difference than we used to find five, 10, or 15 years ago. On the other hand, the customer survey ratings for Shoppers have continued to improve. Interestingly, Shoppers’ surveyed customers rated it substantially higher on “variety of fresh produce” than Giant and Safeway were rated by their customers. 

Trader Joe’s overall ratings on our customer survey were considerably higher than Giant’s or Safeway’s, yet we found its prices aren’t higher. 

Since the market basket we used for our price survey is largely made up of national-brand products, and because Trader Joe’s offers only its own brands, we couldn’t include it in our standard price comparisons that are based on our standard market basket of items. Instead, we had to shop Trader Joe’s using a special survey. In this survey, we included the same fresh produce, meats, and dairy items as we use in our standard survey. For the national-brand items on our list, we first compared the prices of Trader Joe’s store brands to the prices charged by the conventional supermarkets for the comparable national-brand items in our market basket. Then, for a second comparison, we compared Trader Joe’s prices to those charged by the supermarkets for the least expensive comparable item of any brand (including generic brands) they carried. (When comparing prices, we used per-unit pricing—for example, price per ounce.) 

The table below shows the results of these comparisons. 

• In our comparison of Trader Joe’s prices versus the prices of comparable, national-brand items, we found that Trader Joe’s prices were about 19 percent lower than the average of the prices found at Giant and Safeway. 
• When we compared Trader Joe’s prices to the Giant/Safeway average, assuming a shopper would buy at Giant or Safeway the cheapest brand (or generic brand) comparable to each item in our market basket, Trader Joe’s price advantage was sharply reduced; its prices were only about five percent lower than the Giant/Safeway average. (Keep in mind that this second comparison doesn’t take into account product quality, and Trader Joe’s received higher overall ratings from its customers than Giant or Safeway.) 
• For produce, Trader Joe’s prices for the items it carried were about 26 percent lower than the Giant/Safeway average. 
• For meat, Trader Joe’s prices were about eight percent lower than the Giant/Safeway average. 

Aldi offers incredibly steep savings. 

We also shopped Aldi, which is actually owned by the same company that operates Trader Joe’s, using the same method we used to compare Trader Joe’s prices. As you can see on the table above, Aldi’s prices were an astounding 46 percent lower than the Giant/Safeway average for comparable, national-brand items, and 32 percent lower than the big-chain average when we allowed substitution of the cheapest brand available at Giant and Safeway. But these savings come with a downside: we received too few ratings from Aldi’s surveyed customers to report scores for it, but in other areas where we publish CHECKBOOK, where we did have sizeable numbers of ratings from our customer surveys for it, we found Aldi usually got low ratings from its surveyed customers on many of our questions on quality. 

Unfortunately, many Trader Joe’s and Aldi shoppers will have to supplement their trips to those stores with visits to conventional supermarkets. 

The Trader Joe’s store we surveyed had only 37 percent of the items in our market basket in stock when we shopped it, and the Aldi store we surveyed carried only 35 percent of the items. 

The highest prices among stores we surveyed were found at Whole Foods Market. 

Whole Foods’ prices were 23 percent higher than the average of prices at Giant and Safeway—for the limited number of comparable items we could find at each chain. On the other hand, Whole Foods consistently gets very high scores from its customers on our surveys on quality of fresh produce and meat, and many of the items we could compare between Whole Foods and the other chains were fresh produce and meat items. (See our article on Buying Organic Food for more discussion of costs of organic food.) 

When shopping stores that offer store brand or generic products, you save by substituting these products for national brands. 

When we allowed the substitution of cheaper generic and store brands for about one-sixth of the items in our price-shopping market basket, the total cost for our market basket dropped by five to seven percent at Giant and Safeway. 

For the items that could be compared, based on unit prices (price per pound, for example), the membership warehouse stores we surveyed offered dramatic savings. 

The surveyed Sam’s Club store, for example, beat the Giant store we compared it to by a whopping 39 percent. And compared to that Giant store, the savings were about 33 percent at the Costco store we surveyed and 32 percent at BJ’s. 

Since you can’t typically get everything you need at a warehouse store, we looked at the savings you might gain by shopping at both a warehouse store and at a supermarket, assuming you would purchase the lowest cost size available at either place. We found, for example, that by including Costco on your shopping schedule along with a Giant store, you might save about 15 percent compared with shopping at the Giant store alone. 

For more information on how warehouse stores compared on price, go to our section Buying in Bulk: Shopping at Warehouse Stores. 

In addition to having low prices, Costco (though not the other two warehouse chains) got high ratings from surveyed customers for the quality of its fresh meats and produce. 

By being flexible when choosing brands and by shopping specials, you might limit the “extra cost” of shopping at Giant, Harris Teeter, Safeway, or Shoppers Food Warehouse rather than at one of the lowest cost chains. 

For the sake of comparability, our price-comparison shoppers using our “national brand” market basket look for the same brand-name items at each store. Although our market basket of more than 150 items is intended to pick up a reasonably representative number of specials at each store, our brand-specific, time-specific approach might cause us to miss specials that some shoppers might not. 

Consider peanut butter. Our “national brand” market basket specifies Peter Pan peanut butter. If you would buy Peter Pan but would also be willing to substitute Jif or Skippy when they are on special, our price comparison does not reflect the potential savings such flexibility would allow. Also, if you would not have Peter Pan on your list in a specific week but would be willing to buy it for future use if it were on special, our price comparison does not reflect the potential savings that flexibility would allow. 

The potential savings that might result from flexibility in taking advantage of specials are likely to be greater at some stores than at others. Some stores—Walmart, Target, Bottom Dollar, and Wegmans—rely primarily on a strategy of “everyday low prices” to attract and retain customers. Others—Giant, Safeway, Harris Teeter, and Shoppers Food Warehouse—rely more heavily on offering specials—and therefore might be expected to fare better in a price comparison mimicking shoppers who are flexible in taking advantage of specials. 

In fact, however, specials and a personal shopping approach that is more flexible than the survey methods we used for this report would not have much effect on the relative standing of stores in our price comparisons. 

To test our survey methods to see how they might be affected if we assumed greater shopper flexibility on specials, we resurveyed one area store each for Giant, Harris Teeter, Safeway, Shoppers Food Warehouse, and Wegmans. For this shopping, we surveyed the stores during two consecutive sale periods, recording the lowest price offered during either of the sale periods, and also counted the lowest price we found for any competing brand name for each item in our market basket. For example, instead of just looking for the price of a jar of Peter Pan peanut butter, we allowed substitution of either Jif or Skippy, and used the lowest price for any of these three brands during the two sale periods. 

As it turns out, for the two weeks we examined, we didn’t find any large swings in how the five chains performed, compared to the findings from our original survey. Wegmans’ price index score was not dramatically affected by the changes we made. Although the difference between its score and the scores of Giant and Safeway stores decreased by a few percentage points under this price-comparison approach, Wegmans’ prices remained substantially lower. Among Giant, Harris Teeter, and Safeway, the results were about the same as those from our initial survey: the three chains still had about the same relative prices. We did find evidence that Shoppers Food Warehouse may offer the best sales; its price index score dropped to $91 (from $96) when we resurveyed it using the alternative, more special-sensitive method. 

Of course, we can’t predict the results we would have gotten if we had shopped the stores using our revised survey and methods for additional sale weeks. Perhaps the extra, overall cost of shopping at Giant, Harris Teeter, or Safeway rather than a low-cost chain would be smaller over a longer period of time. On the other hand, we didn’t see much evidence that this would occur, and we still believe that the low, everyday prices at Wegmans and other low-cost stores are so hard to beat that it would be difficult for even the most flexible shopper to save money by shopping elsewhere.