I tracked milk prices at 4 stores for a few months and the…
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I tracked milk prices at 4 stores for a few months and the "sale" tag is mostly meaningless
My wife and I have four grocery stores within reasonable driving distance Kroger, Aldi, Target, Walmart. I noticed she basically only shops at one, maybe two of them. Not a criticism, it's just habit. Same store every week because that's the store.
So I got curious and started tracking one item. Milk. Just a gallon of whole milk, same size, week over week, at all four.
What I expected is one store would be consistently cheapest and that'd be that.
What I found is it flipped constantly. Some weeks Aldi. Some weeks Walmart. Target won a couple weeks, which I genuinely did not see coming. There was no stable winner. The cheapest store for milk was basically random from week to week.
But the thing that actually annoyed me was the sale tags. There were multiple weeks where milk was marked as on sale at Kroger and it was still more expensive than the regular everyday price at Aldi. Not by pennies either. The sale price was the fourth cheapest price that week. It was on sale and it was still the worst deal available.
I don't think that's a conspiracy or anything. Sale just means cheaper than what that store was charging before. It doesn't mean cheap. But I'd been treating those tags as a signal my whole adult life and it turns out they're only telling you about one store's own pricing history.
Extrapolate that across a full cart and it adds up to real money. And the frustrating part is there's no easy way to know I had to either check the site or their app you for every item, which took more time then I'd like to admit.
Anyway. I've stopped trusting sale tags. Curious if anyone else has tracked something like this or if I just rediscovered something everyone already knew.
#finance
source
My wife and I have four grocery stores within reasonable driving distance Kroger, Aldi, Target, Walmart. I noticed she basically only shops at one, maybe two of them. Not a criticism, it's just habit. Same store every week because that's the store.
So I got curious and started tracking one item. Milk. Just a gallon of whole milk, same size, week over week, at all four.
What I expected is one store would be consistently cheapest and that'd be that.
What I found is it flipped constantly. Some weeks Aldi. Some weeks Walmart. Target won a couple weeks, which I genuinely did not see coming. There was no stable winner. The cheapest store for milk was basically random from week to week.
But the thing that actually annoyed me was the sale tags. There were multiple weeks where milk was marked as on sale at Kroger and it was still more expensive than the regular everyday price at Aldi. Not by pennies either. The sale price was the fourth cheapest price that week. It was on sale and it was still the worst deal available.
I don't think that's a conspiracy or anything. Sale just means cheaper than what that store was charging before. It doesn't mean cheap. But I'd been treating those tags as a signal my whole adult life and it turns out they're only telling you about one store's own pricing history.
Extrapolate that across a full cart and it adds up to real money. And the frustrating part is there's no easy way to know I had to either check the site or their app you for every item, which took more time then I'd like to admit.
Anyway. I've stopped trusting sale tags. Curious if anyone else has tracked something like this or if I just rediscovered something everyone already knew.
#finance
source
| 2,000 mlx | |
| 4 | |
| 0 |