Proven Ways Grocery Store Hopping Saves You Essential Cash

Will driving around to a bunch of different supermarkets help you save on groceries, or just burn more gas?

A sweeping research project with thousands of data points on grocery costs found that prices at different stores can vary tremendously, even for the same items in the same city.

The Strategic Resource Group & Consumer Reports National Pricing Study compared prices at dozens of grocery chains in six metro areas around the U.S. Consumer Reports covered the results in its January-February 2026 issue.

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The study used Walmart as its price baseline and compared prices for a basket of groceries that included meat, produce and packaged goods nationwide. Warehouse clubs Costco and BJ’s tended to have much lower prices. Walmart, the nation’s largest grocer and the retailer whose prices were used as the study’s benchmark, had lower prices than most other mainstream grocery chains.

For people who have multiple places to shop for groceries within a reasonable driving radius, this offers plenty of opportunity for savings, according to Brian Vines, deputy editor of special projects at Consumer Reports.

“Those conditions facilitate what folks in the industry call cherry-picking, where you may buy paper products at a warehouse store, meat at a supermarket, produce from a no-frills, Aldi-style retailer, and run out to a dollar store or pharmacy to buy a gallon of milk,” he told Food & Wine magazine. “This ideal retail ecosystem gives you greater freedom to know the best prices for what you need and seek out those savings.”

How much can prices vary?

The short answer: a lot.

To compare apples to apples both figuratively and literally, researchers logged all prices within the same 48-hour window for each city, comparing identical products as often as possible and making adjustments for retailers like Aldi that focus on private-label goods. The price comparisons included then-current weekly sale items but didn’t factor in savings from manufacturer’s coupons or app-only savings.

Warehouse clubs Costco and BJ’s offered the best discounts at roughly 21% each — although note that those retailers charge an annual membership fee of $65 and $60, respectively. After that, Lidl and Aldi (which share the same corporate parent) had average prices that were approximately 9% and 8% lower than Walmart’s, respectively. Regional chains WinCo and H-E-B also undercut Walmart, albeit more modestly.

On the other side of the ledger, all of the other grocery chains surveyed rang up higher prices to varying degrees. Regional New England chain Market Basket was only about 1% higher, but mega-grocers Kroger and Albertsons were roughly 15% and 25% higher, respectively. Unsurprisingly, the highest price premium was found at organic foods purveyor Whole Foods; its prices were roughly 40% higher than Walmart’s.

Aside from the cost of the goods themselves, the study noted that local factors like minimum wage laws, real estate prices, property taxes and local competition all feed into how retailers set prices. Individual retailer decisions on everything from labor to inventory management also impact their overhead.

According to Burt P. Flickinger III, managing director of Strategic Resource Group, these decisions factor into the amount of savings retailers can afford to pass onto customers. For instance, “Costco has tremendous retention,” he tells Money. This reputation for investing in workers yields productivity gains.

Depending on what retailers are in a particular area, some outliers were much lower or higher than the national average. The study found that even among mainstream grocery chains (not including Walmart or warehouse clubs), there was at least a 33% price difference in each city.

The difference between the cheapest and most expensive comparable baskets of goods varied considerably around the country, researchers found. In Virginia Beach, Virginia, the difference was a little over $35, but in Los Angeles, that gap was almost $69.

The study looked at national and large regional chains. Flickinger advises Money readers not to overlook smaller, local chains or mom-and-pop stores, which can offer competitive prices even if they lack the economies of scale their mega-chain brethren enjoy.

When is the math worth it?

In this case, the short answer is, “it depends.”

Your chance for the greatest savings comes if you “cherry-pick”; that is, travel to multiple stores to get the cheapest price on individual items. Researchers found examples ranging from Maxwell House coffee to dried Barilla pasta to Cheerios cereal where the most expensive price was roughly double the cheapest price — in the same city. The takeaway for customers: It’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with prices at your local stores to determine where to go for the best deals.

Broadly speaking, Flickinger estimates that cherry-picking could save a typical household as much as $5,000 a year. But to answer this question for your specific circumstances, the point at which you come out ahead depends to a large extent on what you drive and how far you’d have to travel between stores.

What do you drive?

The AAA found that Americans drove cars for just over half (about 52%) of the trips they took in 2025, while SUVs were driven for about a third. Unsurprisingly, drivers of more fuel-efficient vehicles have the edge here.

According to the most recent annual EPA report on trends in fuel economy, ordinary cars get an average of 31.7 mpg in real-world driving conditions. Small SUVs built on car chassis have an average of 30.2 mpg, while truck-style SUVs clock in at 24.7 mpg. Minivans and vans have an average of 25.5 mpg, and pickup trucks have 20.3 mpg. (These figures do not include EVs, which skew fuel economy higher for each category.)

For a precise figure, look up fuel economy data for your vehicle’s make and model, including the model year, since older vehicles tend to be less fuel-efficient.

How much do you pay for gas?

Another variable is the price of gas where you fill up. Nationwide, gas is running just under $4 a gallon for regular, AAA data finds.

The math changes a bit if you drive a performance model that requires premium gasoline, or a diesel-powered vehicle, both of which cost more than standard unleaded fuel. At current prices, the nationwide average is a bit under $5 a gallon for premium and a little over $6 for diesel, according to the AAA.

Drivers of hybrids and electric vehicles will need to figure out the charging-cost equivalent of their miles per gallon. For drivers of EVs and plug-in hybrids, another potential benefit to multiple trips is the possibility of being able to charge your car for free at one or more of your stops.

How far do you have to go?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture found that the median distance most Americans have to travel to get to a grocery store is 0.9 miles. The median distance to the third-closest grocery store is 1.7 miles, but the agency notes that rural households have to travel considerably further: 3.1 miles and 6.1 miles, respectively.

Likewise, Minneapolis Fed research found that the median distance to a Walmart is 4.2 miles, while the median distance to a Target is five miles. Once again, though, the math gets tougher for shoppers in rural areas; for these households, the median distance to a Walmart is about 14 miles, and almost 35 miles to the nearest Target.

If visiting multiple stores adds less than 10 miles to your grocery run, drivers of all but the biggest gas-guzzlers will probably benefit from a “cherry-picking” strategy.

If you have to go further afield, here’s some back-of-the-napkin math with round numbers using current gas prices to help you figure out the cost-benefit analysis of a multi-stop grocery run. If your extra stops tack on 30 miles round trip, and you drive a pickup truck that gets typical mileage (roughly 20 mpg), you’d have to save at least $6 to see real savings. If, on the other hand, you drive a small SUV that gets 30 miles to the gallon (about average for the category), you’d only have to save $4 to come out ahead.

Other considerations

Note the driving conditions along your route. If the stores you visit are relatively close and your route doesn’t include highways, use your vehicle’s mileage rating for city driving, which is lower than the EPA’s real-world average that assumes a blend of city and highway miles.

Summer trips burn more fuel because of how much power it takes to run the air conditioner; experiments conducted by Consumer Reports with a small sedan and a pickup truck found that cranking the AC knocked between 3% and 10% off the stated mileage. (You can mitigate this by opening the windows instead, but then consider how your perishables will fare for an extended journey.)

One thing you don’t need to worry about: the gas consumed at each location when you restart your car. In vehicles with fuel injection systems (which mostly replaced gas-thirstier carburetors by the early 1990s), turning on the ignition burns only an estimated half-teaspoon or so of gas.

Finally, don’t forget to value your time, Flickinger advises. If your multi-store trip eats up a couple of hours, that creates a “soft” expense in the opportunity cost of not being able to use that time for something else.

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