The market basket

Again, I’m doing something a little bit out of the ordinary, but there is a method to my madness. Part of it is for my own personal sake, but there’s the statistic freak in me that has to come out once in awhile; the guy who looks at everything in raw numbers.

But the other reason is pretty simple: all of us have to eat, and all of us like to spend as little money trying to do so as possible. If you’ve ever seen me grocery shop, I carry a notebook with my list on it and on that list is the grocery specials on things I like to consume that are perused from the weekly ads from Giant, Super Fresh, and Food Lion…they’re all on my “Favorites” list and I spend a little time each Saturday checking out the ads online to make my list for Sunday shopping.

One thing I’ve noticed in my time on Delmarva though is that Wal-Mart seems to beat the sale prices half the time. So, numbers freak that I am, a few weeks ago I made a “sample” grocery list of 20 items and Sunday I went out and actually compared the prices.

Now, in order to present these properly, I’m going to have to do a .xls file and place it on my server because there’s no good way to make tables here. So this post will be amended in the next couple days to present the actual list and prices. Yeah, I know, it’s kind of a cheap cliffhanger of sorts, but it’s also almost 11:00 and I’m not staying up half the night to do this post – there’s much more than the prices to make up the story and prove the point.

That’s because I’m planning on making this a semi-occasional continuing process. One reason is just to keep people on Delmarva aware of price trends. Gas is close to $3 a gallon – that effect will trickle down into consumer products sooner or later, as would a downward trend in energy prices.

The second reason is that two pieces of legislation were enacted by the Maryland General Assembly this year, and they could adversely affect grocery prices. One law particularly affects Wal-Mart, but the other law raising the minimum wage may affect the bottom line of all four to an extent as well, since many at the lowest rungs of the grocery business are making pretty close to minimum (think of the teenage bagger or cart collector.)

So this is my little study of microeconomics and the effect of outside factors on the price of food. How much more will be vacuumed out of your wallet with all these external factors?

Without further ado, here are the total bills using the list of the 20 items selected. Tomorrow I should have the backup file completed and link to it here. It’s a WordPerfect file, didn’t need a spreadsheet until next time.

Wal-Mart’s total bill – $41.83
Food Lion’s total – $52.27
Giant’s total – $55.80
Super Fresh’s total – $58.01 $57.01

Now, before the Wal-Mart haters get into a snit about how Wal-Mart is using its leverage to kill the mom-and-pop stores around Salisbury, let it be known that these aren’t tiny chains:

“…Food Lion LLC is a member of Brussels-based Delhaize Group (NYSE: DEG). Food Lion is one of the largest supermarket chains in the United States, operating 1,300 supermarkets, either directly or through affiliated entities, under the names of Food Lion, Bloom, Bottom Dollar, Harveys and Reid’s. These stores meet local customer needs and preferences for the freshest and best quality products in 11 Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic states.”

“Giant Food Inc. was founded in 1936 in Washington, D.C. Today, the company serves customers in the Baltimore/Washington market area and in the Delaware Valley regions of New Jersey and Delaware. The Giant Family now includes over 25,000 associates. In 1998, Giant became a member of the Royal Ahold international family of fine grocery stores.”

“Super Fresh opened its first store in Philadelphia in 1982 and has been creating an exciting, customer friendly shopping experience ever since. We have grown from just a handful of stores in the Philly area to a strong regional chain with 76 stores, serving customers throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. Although the Super Fresh name has only been around since 1982, the company draws upon many years of grocery retail history.

The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A & P), the parent company of Super Fresh, has been in business since 1859. The success of the company comes from the combination of the forward thinking of Super Fresh and the rich tradition of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. “

It’s long since past the day when the corner grocery store was a mom-and-pop operation, as you can see by the players in the Salisbury area. In fact, it’s now a global business as two of the four are foreign-owned.

In the coming months I’ll repeat this experiment occasionally just to check up on how consumer prices are being affected by economic factors. And as stated, I’ll post the actual results and list soon – perhaps you can check your own grocery store and see how the prices compare. I’d love to see someone from Northwest Ohio do this, because I swear groceries are more expensive here than they were back there.

Study notes: the list was made up in early March so I couldn’t cherrypick sale prices. I shopped at the Fruitland Wal-Mart, the Waverly Giant, the Super Fresh on College Avenue, and the Food Lion at Route 50 and Tilghman Road. Other notes will be on the file showing the actual list and prices.

Extra edit: Some will probably question my use of certain products, but I tried to stay with national brands that are found in all the stores, except I used the store brand milk and eggs.

It occurred to me as I was finishing up the list that I should have specified a couple more things – for example, I’m not sure I used large eggs at each store. And Wonder bread now comes in a confusing array of white breads. But that’s not going to make a difference in the overall rank.

Also, it’s possible that the prices at Wal-Mart are also temporary sale prices, but I get no grocery ad from them that says so. It’s apparent from months of shopping there that these prices are pretty much the standard.

I’m going to have to remind myself come fall to do this again – optimally I’ll use a week that’s enough before a holiday to not affect prices greatly. Then I’ll have a comparison to the prices in the spring and can see how much inflation has hit the grocery market.