Costco, Sam’s Club or BJ’s? We compared prices, value to see which warehouse club is best

Three quick takeaways:

• The News & Observer conducted a price check and product comparison among three wholesale clubs in Raleigh: Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s. We found Sam’s Club to offer the best value overall for both pricing and bulk quantities.
• On a sample list of 60 items, Sam’s Club had both the lowest total price and highest quantity of items (or “bulkiest” shopping experience).
• These savings might require buying larger packs or forgoing some premium brands that may be available at other wholesale clubs like Costco. To get the best price, shoppers should buy in-store, as online prices often include additional delivery and pickup fees.

We all need the staples: Toilet paper and sticks of butter, jars of peanut butter and boxes of dry pasta, ibuprofen and AAA batteries.

When shopping wholesale, you can get bulk quantities that often let you save money on individual items, compared to their prices at grocery or big-box stores.

With three wholesale (or warehouse) clubs in the Triangle area of North Carolina to choose from, we wanted to dig in and see which one offered shoppers the best value.

But “value” isn’t so easily defined. Low prices absolutely contribute, but quality of the items and heftiness of the bulk packaging should be considered too.

So The News & Observer price-checked and taste-tested popular items to help you determine which wholesale club is best for your household. Since these clubs come with membership fees, we wanted to help you figure out which one you might consider worth paying for.

We also looked into further discount opportunities — like cash back offerings, in-store rewards programs and gas prices — that might help you determine which wholesale club membership to choose.

Before we get started, let’s address some notes on how we approached comparing prices:

• Our price check is not a scientific study. It’s a rough sample with real in-store prices at Raleigh wholesale club locations (as of the dates we visited in mid-February).

• We did not include discounted or sale prices in this sample. All prices reflected here are purely face-value, or the price before the discount (on items that were discounted). The list does not reflect how much you would actually pay when buying all these items in-store.

• Cash back offerings can help offset wholesale club prices, but they are not direct discounts that get applied to orders. Costco’s premium membership gives you an annual cash back reward that can be redeemed as a gift card, and Sam’s Club collects cash back rewards in real time for premium members to be applied to your next order. While you may want to take cash back opportunities into account when determining which wholesale club is right for you, they might not necessarily lower your shopping receipt.

Which wholesale club has the lowest prices?

• Sam’s Club has the lowest prices and most items per package. Here’s how we got there:

• We started with a list of around 100 items we wanted to compare at each store. The list was split roughly in half to compare store-brand items and name-brand items, like Cheerios, Doritos, Advil and others.

• Many of those items didn’t have direct comparisons across wholesale clubs, or items were out of stock on the day we visited. So whenever there wasn’t an easily comparable item, we deleted it from the list. That left our sample size at 60 items.

• We added up all 60 items to determine which store would let you buy all of the items on our sample list at the lowest price. Sam’s Club was the winner at $777.42 for all 60 items. BJ’s was second-lowest at $795.19, and Costco was the most expensive with $833.08.

• Note: These three prices are not true receipt amounts, as we did not add sales tax nor did we include any store discounts. This is the raw total of 60 items at their non-discounted price (even if the store was running a discount on many of the items on the day we visited to calculate prices).

• We also took into consideration how many individual items you can get when shopping wholesale. For example, this list looks at 48-ounce tubs of cream cheese, 64-ounce jars of mayonnaise and 8-pound packs of dry pasta. We looked at how large a bulk quantity each store offers using this sample list of 60 items. Sam’s Club offered the bulkiest shopping experience, measuring nearly 5,900 “units” of product. Costco was the second bulkiest, measuring nearly 5,700 units. BJ’s offered the lightest shopping experience, measuring just over 5,000 units when purchasing the store’s offerings of those 60 items.

• Sam’s Club also offers the lowest price per unit within our sample list of 60 items. When taking the total price and dividing by the total number of units, we see Sam’s offers the lowest price per individual unit, though it’s not drastically lower than the other two wholesale clubs. Within our 60-item sample list, Sam’s Club offered 13 cents per unit, followed by Costco at 15 cents, then BJ’s at 16.

• NC State’s Emily Griffith, associate department head of the Department of Statistics, approved of this method to determine which wholesale club has the best prices and value.

An AARP study from October 2023 agreed: Sam’s Club lets shoppers save the most when buying in bulk, compared to Costco and BJ’s. The downside: Sam’s doesn’t have the premium brands Costco often carries, they wrote.

Here’s how you can save even more money shopping wholesale

• To save the most, you probably have to buy the most. To get the cheapest individual price, you usually have to buy the largest pack — which can come out to a higher total price.

For example, Costco sells a 128-ounce tub of Duke’s Mayonnaise for $13.49, which comes out to $0.11 per ounce. A 64-ounce tub costs $8.48 ($0.13 per ounce) at Sam’s Club and $11.79 ($0.18 per ounce) at BJ’s. You have to spend a bit more — and get a tub of mayo that’s double the size — to buy it at the lowest price per ounce.

• Shop in-store for better prices. Costco appears to mark up their online prices, so the best bang for your buck comes with in-store shopping. A spokesperson did not respond to repeated attempts to confirm this.

Sam’s Club has the same prices in-store and online, but delivery and curbside pickup fees can mark up the final cost per item, said spokesperson Katelynn Gorton.

BJ’s appears to have the same prices in-store as online, but a spokesperson would not confirm this to The N&O.

How The N&O price-checked wholesale clubs

Below are some notes about our methodology, explaining why we price checked certain items the way we did:

• Meat quantities: This list only looks at the price of one pound of wholesale meat instead of a whole pack. This is because each pack is a different size, and the shopper chooses how much or how little of the meat they would like to buy.

Both boneless skinless chicken breast and ground beef are reflected as price per pound at each wholesale club.

• Toilet tissue and paper towels: Even though these were among the most popular items bought across wholesale clubs, we decided against comparing store-brand paper towels and toilet tissue, as there wasn’t a seamless way to compare the three stores’ offerings.

The three stores also don’t sell a common paper towel that we could compare. The only common toilet tissue sold at all three wholesale clubs is Scott 1100 1-ply Toilet Paper, all having 1100 sheets via 36 rolls at 1-ply each.

This product has the lowest price in-store at Costco, coming out to $0.73 per roll. Sam’s Club sells this product at $0.75 per roll, while BJ’s sells at a whopping $1 per roll.

You can look at the prices of all of the items we shopped in our online database.

What shoppers say

Marlene Langsam and Lynn Samberg have memberships to both Sam’s Club and Costco, choosing Sam’s when shopping for events at their synagogue and Costco when doing their own household shopping.

Sam’s Club has “better snacks” and great prices on drinks, like soda and beer, Langsam said. When buying for the synagogue (including the temple’s trivia night fundraiser they were shopping for when interviewed in late February), they need to keep everything kosher, and Sam’s snack pack offerings help them snag kosher snacks in bulk.

But they both said they prefer Costco’s layout and store-brand offerings.

Langsam’s favorite Kirkland item: Rotisserie chicken.

Samberg said she keeps kosher for all her meals, and Costco has lots of kosher grocery options there too, so she doesn’t feel she has to stick to one wholesale club over the other to meet her kosher dietary needs.

Two other shoppers, who would not give their names, said Raleigh’s Sam’s Club on Calvary Drive is close to where they live and often fairly empty, making it easy to get in and out quickly whenever they need to go shopping. They also found the store layout adding to the convenience factor. One shopper also had a BJ’s membership but preferred visiting Sam’s Club, and the other only had a membership to Sam’s.

What wholesale clubs say

We sent our main findings to representatives at Costco, BJ’s and Sam’s Club ahead of publication to offer them the chance to comment.

▪ BJ’s said: “We are the only wholesale club that accepts manufacturers’ coupons. To fulfill the needs of smart-saving families, BJ’s offers smaller pack sizes of fresh produce compared to other wholesale clubs. These packs are priced up to 25% less than those found in regular grocery store chains.”

▪ Costco reached out after publication to highlight nuances between items sold across wholesale clubs.

John Hickey, a vice president for Costco’s southeast region, highlighted differences between Costco and Sam’s Club’s store-brand chocolate covered almonds and laundry detergent, as well as Heinz ketchup and Neosporin ointment.

“Overall, in many instances with pricing, some of this was highly accurate. Others, because maybe the items aren’t exactly the same, there are some differences,” Hickey said.

▪ Sam’s Club did not comment.

The three bullet points at the top of the article were created using an AI tool for summarization and edited by journalists. Read more on our AI policy here.

This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 5:55 AM.

Kimberly Cataudella Tutuska

The News & Observer

919-419-6630

Kimberly Tutuska (she/her) is the editor of North Carolina’s service journalism team.