Rosie has now ridden in the cart at four different grocery stores in one week, and her review is that Kroger has the best carts (there's a car on the front) and H-E-B has the best samples. My review is a little more detailed.
The first week of March, I priced the same 25-item basket at Aldi, Kroger, Walmart and H-E-B. People ask me all the time which store is cheapest, and I've always said "Aldi, mostly," without a number I'd stand behind. This time I wanted the number.
How I did it
- Same week, Monday through Friday, March 2 to 6. Aldi on Monday, Kroger Tuesday after work, the Walmart Neighborhood Market on Wednesday, and H-E-B in Frisco on Friday, tied to an errand up there.
- Store brand wherever there was one. When sizes didn't match, I priced by the ounce or the pound and scaled to the same amount.
- Shelf prices, the price anyone walking in would pay. For Kroger I also figured the total with the digital coupons loaded to my account, since I always use them.
- I bought our actual groceries at Aldi as usual and only priced the rest, which left a very long note on my phone.
- Tom Thumb isn't in here. I only shop there for weekly ad deals, and pricing it would have meant comparing sale prices to everyone else's shelf prices.
The basket was 25 things we buy most weeks: eggs, a gallon of milk, butter, shredded cheddar, plain yogurt, sour cream, 2 pounds of ground beef, 3 pounds of boneless chicken breast, 3 pounds of bone-in chicken thighs, smoked sausage, flour tortillas, a 2-pound bag of pinto beans, rice, spaghetti, pasta sauce, canned black beans, peanut butter, a big canister of ground coffee, sandwich bread, bananas, yellow onions, a 5-pound bag of russet potatoes, a bag of apples, baby carrots and dish soap.
The totals
- Aldi: $78.42
- Walmart: $84.16, about 7% more than Aldi
- H-E-B: $86.90, about 11% more
- Kroger: $95.31 at shelf price, about 22% more, or $89.77 with digital coupons, about 14% more
Aldi winning didn't surprise me. How close Walmart came did. On a $78 basket, Walmart was only $5.74 more. Stretched across one of our usual $265 weeks, a 7% gap is around $18. That's real money, but it's less than I'd assumed.
Where each store surprised me
Aldi was cheapest on 16 of the 25 items and won big on dairy, meat and pantry staples. Eggs at $2.29, butter at $3.59, shredded cheddar at $2.19 and ground beef at $5.99 a pound are why it's our main store. It lost on a few things I didn't expect, including onions and potatoes.
Walmart beat Aldi on three items: milk ($2.78 against Aldi's $2.85), peanut butter and dish soap. Household items in general ran cheaper there, which lines up with what we already do, using Walmart+ delivery for the heavy and household stuff.
H-E-B won five: flour tortillas, bone-in thighs from the meat counter, rice, onions and potatoes. The tortillas were $1.78 for ten against Aldi's $1.95, and they're better tortillas, which I'll say to anyone who stands still long enough. Where H-E-B lost ground was dairy and coffee. It's also 25 minutes from our house, so a trip just for groceries would cost the savings back in gas and most of a morning. When we're already in Frisco, I load up on tortillas and meat.
Kroger was the most expensive at shelf price, by a lot. Digital coupons knocked off $5.54, which closed about a third of its gap with Aldi. With coupons, Kroger had the cheapest coffee of all four ($8.99 against Aldi's $10.49), and that one item explains a lot about why I'm at Kroger most weeks anyway: the coupons, the fuel points and the pickup. Meat was where Kroger hurt most, with ground beef at $6.79 a pound against Aldi's $5.99.
What we're changing
Not much, honestly, which is its own kind of answer. Aldi stays the Monday shop with Rosie in the cart. Kroger stays for midweek fill-ins, pickup and coffee, but I'm done buying regular-price meat there. H-E-B keeps the tortilla and meat-counter run every two or three weeks. Walmart keeps the paper towels and dish soap.
The one habit I'll change is small: checking Walmart's milk price before I grab three gallons at Aldi out of habit. Seven cents a gallon, three gallons a week, is about $11 a year. I tracked four stores for a week to find eleven dollars, and I'm a little proud of that.
Rosie, for the record, would like to go back to H-E-B. It was the cheese sample.
