Grocery Price Comparison: Walmart vs. Safeway

If you’re visiting Northern California and looking for groceries for your trip (or if you live here) you will probably have a nearby Safeway and a Walmart available to you. Today I did a grocery run to a local Walmart SuperStore instead of my usual haunt, Safeway. I was curious to see how much the prices differed.

Being a data geek and trying to avoid doing other things I should probably be doing, I compared 24 items I bought at Walmart with their (online) Safeway price. (Please note that my photos include some items for which I couldn’t find an exact Safeway match, so they aren’t included in the data below.)

Here are the exciting results!

Drinks

Frozen Foods

Deli

Pantry

Paper Goods

Produce

Conclusion

Wow! I was shocked with the comparison. Overall the items I’ve listed above cost $172.59 at Walmart vs. $242.05 at Safeway! That’s a $69.46 difference, or 40% less at Walmart!!

“Pantry items” may be cheaper at Safeway as long as you hit their sales at the right time. The biggest Walmart saving categories seem to be Produce and Paper Goods. But Walmart outprices Safeway significantly almost across the board!

I have a vaguely negative connotation associated with Walmart, but I am not sure if that’s from long ago or what. Is there an ethical issue with Walmart we should be aware of? How do they offer such cheap prices? Please let me know in the comments if you have any intel or links about this.

I hope you enjoyed this unusual Sojourns With Sue post! Thanks for reading!!

Update

A Facebook reader provided this link to me in response to my questions about Walmart’s ethics: Walmart engaged in illegal union busting at California store, U.S. agency says Basically, Walmart has been accused of poor treatment of employees, including not allowing unionization. I checked into it, and it looks like Safeway does have unionized employees, and this may be part of the reason for their higher costs, as well as their smaller size overall.

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