How Much Will You Save on Groceries by Joining a Warehouse Club?
Last updated November 2025
For some food shopping, warehouse clubs offer low-cost alternatives to supermarkets. Using our market basket of 150 grocery items, we surveyed prices for BJ’s and Costco and and compared them to Walmart, Target, and traditional supermarkets.
The warehouse clubs carried few if any of the 150 items in our market basket in the usual sizes. But when we looked for the same brands regardless of size, warehouse stores—which specialize in bulk sales—stocked a larger portion of our market basket items. BJ’s had 73 percent and Costco 38 percent.
Since the warehouse stores stocked so few items in the sizes of our basic market basket, we looked for items of any size from the same brands. We then used unit prices (for example, price per pound) to calculate the warehouse stores’ prices for amounts specified in the market basket. Then we compared the prices of items at the warehouse stores with prices for the same brands at several other stores. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison—the sizes of the items priced at the warehouse stores were usually larger than the sizes of the items priced at the other stores—so the warehouse stores enjoy an advantage in such a comparison.
The figure below indicates how much warehouse stores could save you. Somewhat surprisingly, for this year’s survey we found BJ’s prices were about eight percent lower than Costco’s.
Although BJ’s and Costco offered very low prices, overall, Costco beat Market Basket by only six percent and Walmart by eight percent. So while Costco offered significant savings compared to, say Stop & Shop, paying six percent less than at Market Basket might not justify paying Costco’s $65 annual membership fee if you don’t visit often. You’d have to spend more than $1,000 at Costco on products you could buy at Market Basket before breaking even. And if half of what you buy is wasted due to spoilage, you won’t save at all by buying in bulk.
In addition to having low prices, Costco received high customer ratings for the quality of its meat and overall quality. (BJ’s ratings were considerably lower than Costco’s.)
