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 Costco and Sam’s Club 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. Costco had 42 percent and Sam’s Club 57 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. Surprisingly, for this year’s survey we found Costco’s prices were, overall, about 20 percent higher than Sam’s Club, and even three percent higher than Walmart. In previous price surveys, Costco’s and Sam’s Club’s prices were always about the same.
We were stunned by this shift—in the other metro areas where we publish Consumers’ Checkbook, Costco remains competitive with its warehouse-club competitors and still charges considerably lower prices than Walmart and Target—although that gap has narrowed in the last few years.
But even after rechecking Costco’s prices at its Chicago area stores over several different weeks, we continued to find that its prices were less competitive here than elsewhere, especially for fresh produce.
Although Costco still offers far lower prices than, say, Jewel or Mariano’s, it’s losing any head-to-head price competition with Sam’s Club. It’s now difficult to justify paying Costco’s $65 annual membership fee if you’re happy with Sam’s Club or Walmart’s grocery offerings.
Costco does continue to receive very high customer ratings for the quality of its meat.
