I've seen a few posts over the years with people singling out certain grocery stores as being more expensive than others, so I decided to shop around to see how much truth there was to this. I picked a few reference items and tried to find the exact same item at each store, and noted the prices in the chart below (deviations where the reference brand or size wasn't available are noted). I have a family and work two jobs, so this took a couple months to complete so the prices may vary, but I checked in on a couple stores recently and their prices were still relatively close to this table.

To summarize, if you bought one of each item on the list, the community grocery stores were all pretty much the same overall price of around $85+/-, the volume stores were about 25% cheaper, Costco was about 35% cheaper (taking into consideration my missing $/lb price for the peppers), and Whole Foods was about 35% more expensive (mostly due to their meat prices).

For the 5 community stores I went to, if you shopped around and bought from the store with the cheapest price for each item, it would cost around $75 or a 12% savings.

This doesn't take into account sale prices, but should put to rest any notion that one store is gouging you more than another.

Just a quick note that the point of this wasn't to make an argument about who has the best produce or carries the most local items or how to save the most money while shopping. I realize I could have chosen cheaper eggs, or that some stores carry more local produce than others. This was simply to compare prices across different stores at face-value because I was getting tired of reading posts where people claimed Store A is a rip-off while someone else would claim that Store B was actually the most expensive, but no one ever provided any numbers. I prefer an evidence based argument, so I decided to put the claims to the test.

If you prefer to save more money by buying cheaper eggs or no-name brands, or you want to drive across town to get fresher veggies from somewhere else, go for it. Full disclaimer that my wife works at SOF and we get 10% off there, but Thrifty's is 1/4 of the distance to drive to from our house so we do most of our small-item shopping there. But for large quantities of non-perishables, freezables, and fruit, we're driving to Costco!