We checked prices at 16 Raleigh grocery stores to find the best values. Our 2024 results
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Price Check: Your guide to the Triangle’s grocery stores and warehouse clubs
Read The News & Observer for tips and advice to make the best choices while shopping for groceries — and more — at traditional grocers and wholesale clubs in North Carolina.
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Grocery shopping. For some, it’s a chore. But for others, it’s an adventure.
Many factors may affect where a shopper decides to go. Perhaps a store’s proximity to home or work makes a difference. Or maybe customers seek out the shops that offer the best deals or have a wide variety of stocked products.
Regardless of our reasons, we all have to run to the store at some point to purchase something. But who has time to compare which stores have the lowest prices?
We do.
The News & Observer’s service journalism team set out to price check 40 common grocery list items at 16 well-shopped stores in Raleigh, pricing out 20 store-brand and 20 name-brand items at each one.
We hope this data — presented in full in a searchable database — is helpful for residents who shop in our region and want to find the best value for their everyday needs.
Which Raleigh grocery store has the lowest prices?
Of our 40-item list, we have 15 items that just about all grocery stores carry, so we are using those prices and quantities to determine the best “value” of the major grocers in the Triangle.
We broke the products down to their price per unit so we could fairly compare all items against one another at a uniform size. With this method, we found ALDI to have the lowest prices of all comparable grocery stores in Raleigh.
Some of the items (both on our full 40-item list and comparable 15-item list) are organic, free-range, grass-fed or otherwise different from the others, which drives up their price. Many shoppers find these worth the price point, valuing organic or hormone-free products over the lowest possible price — and our area is home to quite a few stores that value this too.
We price checked but ultimately excluded Dollar General and Weaver Street Market from the value comparison, as neither carried most of the store-brand items we were using to compare. The majority of Raleigh’s Dollar General locations don’t sell fresh produce — only one does, while the rest stick mostly to pantry staples, frozen items and a small dairy selection. The locally owned Weaver Street Market also has a limited selection, selling very few items under its own brand to instead focus on products from local farms.
But if you want the absolute most bang for your buck, here’s how Raleigh’s 14 grocery stores stack up (ranked least to most expensive):
ALDI
Lidl
Walmart
Food Lion
Target
Wegmans
Trader Joe’s
Publix
Carlie C’s
Harris Teeter
Lowes Foods
The Fresh Market
Whole Foods Market
Sprouts Farmers Market
To determine the best value, we simply added up the 15 comparable items — many of which were adjusted to compare all items at an equal size — and sorted those total numbers from lowest (the best value) to highest (the worst value). You can dive into our full methodology below.
ALDI had the best price of most individual items (of the selected 15), carrying the lowest store-brand price of flour, granny smith apples, canned tomatoes, a loaf of bread and other household staples.
Note: This is not a scientific study, but it is a real reflection of items’ prices at grocery stores in Raleigh in the first week of June 2024.
We encourage you to also take a look at our 2022 and 2019 price checks, to get an idea of how the grocery landscape has changed in Raleigh over the past five years.
Grocery price check: How we did it
Here’s more detail on our methodology.
▪ Items selected: We created a list of 40 common grocery items, splitting the list in half to include 20 store-brand and 20 name-brand items. Many of the stores had all 40 items, but a few didn’t. Trader Joe’s carries mostly store-brand items, and other stores (like Sprouts, Weaver Street and Whole Foods) carry a specific selection of items and didn’t have quite a few of the name-brand items chosen to represent a typical weekly shopping list.
Our default item was non-organic and a smaller size, which we often consciously chose between a few options in a store. Among our list, for example, this looked like medium avocados (not large) and large eggs (not jumbo). When a grocery store did not have options and only presented one item (i.e. only selling jumbo eggs or organic potatoes), we used the available item in our price check.
▪ In-store shopping only: We only looked at in-store items, never using an online price in our reporting. Online prices may be higher, as shipping and other fees could be added to the items themselves.
▪ Where we shopped: We shopped 16 grocery chains in Raleigh: ALDI, Carlie C’s, Dollar General, Food Lion, The Fresh Market, Harris Teeter, Lidl, Lowes Foods, Publix, Sprouts Farmers Market, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, Weaver Street Market, Wegmans and Whole Foods Market. We visited these stores the first week of June, snapping photos of each available product on our 40-item list to record prices in real time.
We did not include warehouse clubs (Costco, Sam’s Club and BJ’s) in our comparison, since we did a separate price check project all about wholesale clubs earlier this spring.
▪ Uniform sizing: Some stores had a different-sized item from our list — a 48-ounce carton of chicken broth when we wanted 32-ounce, or a gallon of apple cider vinegar when we wanted 12 ounces. In these instances, we calculated the price per unit and included the total price at our desired quantity.
We want to stress that some of these items’ prices are not exactly what you’ll find in stores, since buying a larger size often lowers the price per unit. This math merely helped compare items across most stores to determine value.
We also had to finagle Trader Joe’s produce prices, which were sold by the individual fruit. To compare their pricing with other stores, we determined the standard size of those fruits and calculated the price per pound.
▪ Regular price only: This list does not reflect sale prices, even if the item was on sale at the time of our grocery visit. (Many, and sometimes most, of the items we price checked were on sale when we visited, but we recorded the non-sale price.)
These numbers also do not factor in other price-lowering opportunities, like store rewards programs, credit cards that offer cash back and weekly flyer coupons. You can learn more about getting the best possible price at all 16 major grocery stores in our region with our grocery deals guide.
Which grocery stores do Raleigh shoppers prefer?
Value aside, all grocery stores have a customer base in the region, and shoppers return again and again to their favorite stores because of the items available, freshness and produce quality, proximity to their home/workplace or organic/natural selection. (Personally, we think you should try them all.)
Here’s what shoppers told us:
▪ Steve Binger regularly shops at Harris Teeter because it’s only four minutes from his house, but he was interviewed in Whole Foods Market while squeezing avocados to buy just one for dinner.
“I’ve already been to Wegmans and Trader Joe’s, and neither one had ripe avocados. I was going right by here on the way home.”
Typically, he doesn’t compare prices across stores because he doesn’t do his regular shopping anywhere else — “except times like today to get one avocado,” he said laughing.
▪ Jeff Martin used to shop at Lidl, but after he moved, ALDI became his go-to grocery store. He said he visits the Wake Forest Road location several times a week, taking home just a few items each time.
The selection of food items — especially cheese, bread and chips — along with affordable prices make ALDI the place Martin wants to shop.
▪ Marty Dover also thinks about price above all. Dover is a single mom who only shops at ALDI and Walmart, finding other stores can eat up an entire paycheck just on the month’s groceries, she said.
“It’s just more affordable. I typically shop at ALDI, but I sometimes run into [Walmart] because there are certain staples I get in here that they don’t have,” Dover said.
She finds Walmart has the protein yogurt she likes feeding her kids, and she can get a bigger bag of shredded cheese to take advantage of bulk prices.
▪ For Raleigh resident Sally Rice, ALDI visits are part of her routine. She visits the Wake Forest Road store every Wednesday morning, but she’s also in the habit of visiting two other ALDI locations on Capital Boulevard and Creedmoor Road.
“Some might have other stuff,” Rice said. “They might have more.”
She sometimes shops at Food Lion, but ALDI has everything she needs: meat, fruit, vegetables, cheese and the aisle of shame, where she finds presents for her grandkids. On a recent trip, she grabbed a rock-painting kit. And she’s very proud of her Bogg Bag copycats, which she snagged for a bargain of just over $20.
This story was originally published June 17, 2024 at 8:00 AM.
