At 7:45 last Saturday morning, Nora climbed into the Pilot with a clipboard, three gel pens and a printed list of 32 groceries. She had volunteered to be the recorder in exchange for one treat at the last store. By 10:50 we had priced the same list at Publix, Kroger and Aldi, and her clipboard said this:
- Publix: $142.86
- Kroger: $131.40
- Aldi: $104.17
All three totals are before tax. Tennessee charges a reduced state rate on groceries plus local tax, and it lands the same way at every store, so it changes the size of the receipt but not who wins.
September was our month of trying two meal kit services, and comparing those boxes to our usual groceries made me realize I didn't actually know what our usual groceries cost at each store. I knew what they felt like. That isn't the same thing.
The rules were simple. The list was the 32 things we buy almost every week: a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, butter, cheddar, yogurt, sour cream, bananas, apples, potatoes, onions, carrots, celery, lettuce, tomatoes, lemons, chicken thighs, two pounds of ground beef, bacon, bread, tortillas, flour, sugar, mayonnaise, pasta, crushed tomatoes, black beans, rice, peanut butter, coffee, cereal, crackers and a bag of frozen broccoli. Same sizes everywhere, or the closest size with the price adjusted. Store brand wherever there was one, except two things I won't trade down on: White Lily flour and Duke's mayonnaise. Aldi carries neither, so Aldi's total uses its own flour and mayonnaise. Keep that in mind before you read too much into the gap.
One teacher note. The only fair way to compare a 30-ounce jar to a 48-ounce jar is the unit price, the small number on the shelf tag that gives the cost per ounce or per pound. My students learn to find it in our budgeting unit. Nora used it all morning without being told, and I'm choosing to take credit.
The loyalty deals that changed the totals
At Publix the shelf prices added up to $153.62. Three items on our list were buy-one-get-one that week (cereal, crackers and bacon), and since we would use both, I counted the deal. That took off $10.76. At Kroger the shelf total was $140.85, and the card prices plus four digital coupons I clipped in the parking lot brought it down $9.45. Aldi has no card and no coupons. The shelf price is the price.
Without the deals, Publix and Kroger were $12.77 apart. With them, $11.46. So the deals mattered, but less than I expected, and they change every week. The Aldi gap didn't need any help.
Where each store won
Back home, Nora went line by line with a highlighter. Aldi had the lowest price on 21 of the 32 items: nearly all the produce, the dairy, the bread, the canned goods, the rice and the pasta. Kroger won 7: the chicken thighs and ground beef on card prices, the coffee with a digital coupon, the peanut butter, the sour cream, and White Lily and Duke's. Aldi's stand-ins for those last two were cheaper, but they aren't the same product, and I'm the one who has to eat the biscuits. Publix won 4: the three buy-one-get-one items and the lemons, which I cannot explain.
The gap between the highest and lowest total was $38.69 for one week of our groceries. Some of that is store brands, some is Aldi's smaller stores and shorter hours, and some is simply that the bananas were cheaper. It's still real money on a teacher's salary.
Where we shop now
Aldi is on my way home from school in Columbia, so it now gets the weekly base list on Thursday afternoons. Kroger gets a Saturday trip every other week for meat, White Lily, Duke's and whatever the digital coupons line up. Publix gets a stop when at least two things on our list are buy-one-get-one, which happens more often than you'd think. Costco stays where it was, every six weeks or so for coffee, butter and paper goods.
That's what the numbers said for our list, in our town, on one Saturday at the end of September. Your list and your stores could come out differently, and prices will have moved by the time you read this. If you try it yourself, I'd make one change: price twenty items, not thirty-two. The whole morning took three hours, and Nora's treat (a bag of sour gummy worms from Aldi, $1.89) was fully earned somewhere around item nineteen at Kroger.
