Christmas is an expensive time of year at the best of times, without double-digit inflation in food prices and a provincial turkey shortage driving costs up more.
According to Statistics Canada, as of October the Consumer Price Index was up 6.9 per cent year-to-year, and food prices were up 10.1 per cent year-to-year.
To help Prince George residents make the most of their holiday shopping budget, the Citizen decided to put the city’s four largest grocery retailers – Costco, Save-on-Foods (Spruceland location), Real Canadian Superstore and Wal-Mart – to a side-by-side price comparison test, to see which store offered the best value for your holiday meal.
THE RULES
Citizen reporter Arthur Williams visited all four stores on Friday (Dec. 16), between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., and shopped for the same list of 12 Christmas dinner food items at each store.
For each item, the cheapest option available on the shelf at each store was selected, including sale items, generic store brands and membership discounts. However, no member points were used to obtain free or discounted items.
Reusable bags were used to avoid being charged for plastic bags.
If the size or quantity specified in the list wasn’t available, the closest available size or quantity was chosen. This was especially a factor at Costco, which specializes in bulk sales. To make this an apples-to-apples comparison, we have listed both the total price and the price adjusted for quantity.
After the Citizen’s comparison shop, all the food was donated to the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s downtown drop-in centre to be used for their Christmas Day dinner service.
"Everybody wins with this story," Citizen publisher Curtis Armstrong said. "Citizen readers get important information about shopping for Christmas dinner while St. Vincent de Paul will be using our food donation to feed local residents at their annual Christmas dinner."
THE LIST
Because of cost and a lack of availability, we avoided the traditional turkey-and-stuffing meal. Our planned meal for roughly four to six people was: baked ham, mashed potatoes with gravy, butter-glazed carrots and green beans, kernel corn and dinner rolls, with eggnog to drink and pumpkin pie with whipped cream for dessert.
Here is the shopping list we took to each store:
1 boneless ham (approx. 1.5 kg)
1 5 lbs. bag of russet potatoes
1 stick of butter
2L of 2% milk
1 packet brown gravy mix (approx. 25 g)
1 lbs. of green beans
3 lbs. bag of carrots
2 cans of kernel corn (approx. 350 ml each)
1 dozen white dinner rolls
1 L of eggnog
1 pumpkin pie
1 can of aerosol whipped cream
And best deal for your holiday meal is..
REAL CANADIAN SUPERSTORE ($61.78)
Real Canadian Superstore walked away with this one, coming in $8.68 cheaper than Wal-Mart and $12.06 cheaper than Save-on-Foods.
Superstore would have done even better if they’d had 1 L containers of eggnog in stock on Friday. We were forced to pick up the 2 L size instead.
Costco, as always, is the X-factor – a lot more money for a lot more food. Keep reading to see if buying in bulk really saved us money.
WAL-MART ($70.46)
In second place, Wal-Mart lost a game of inches to Superstore – a few dollars more for the ham, a few dollars on the pie, $0.47 per can of corn, etc. We’ll come back to that pie, because the price tag doesn’t tell the whole story.
Wal-Mart also took a hit on green beans. The store only sold pre-packaged bags of 340 g each (about 0.75 pounds), which forced us to buy two bags to get the required pound of beans. Each bag was $3.97, while the pound of bulk green beans at Superstore was only $3.52.
But bulk wasn’t always cheaper, Superstore didn’t have a 5 lbs. bag of russet potatoes, and buying them in bulk cost $9.31, compared to $4.97 for the 5 lbs. bag we got at Wal-Mart.
SAVE-ON-FOODS ($73.84)
While competitive, or only slightly more expensive that Superstore on many items, Save-on-Foods took a some big hits on the ham, butter and carrots.
The ham, even on sale, was $4 more than at Superstore, the butter $1.80 more and the carrots were whopping $4.82 more. The pie was a $0.99 more (but again, we’ll talk about those pies), and Save-on-Foods was little pricier for the milk and canned corn as well.
The 5 lbs. bag of potatoes at Save-on-Foods was also cheaper than Superstore’s bulk potatoes, however.
COSTCO ($102.65)
At $40.87 more expensive that Real Canadian Superstore, Costco came in a distant fourth place. But the food we bought at Costco would make far more than a single meal for four to six people.
The only items we were able to get in the quantity specified on our list were the ham, butter and pie.
We ended up with 1.5 times as many green beans; double the amount of milk, eggnog, dinner rolls and whipped cream; triple the potatoes; 3.3 times as many carrots; six times as much corn; and 31 times as much gravy mix as our meal plan required.
Once we crunched the numbers and adjusted the prices at Costco to reflect the quantities we got, Costco came in at $55.63 for the comparable amount of food – a savings of $6.15 compared to Real Canadian Superstore.
But that savings is only a savings if you actually use all the food you purchase. If you end up throwing out six pounds of limp, floppy carrots in February that have been sitting in your vegetable crisper since Christmas, or 10 pounds of moldy potatoes, then you’ve saved nothing by buying in bulk.
But on the other hand, if you’re feeding a big mob of people and need 15 lbs. of mashed potatoes and a gallon of gravy, then Costco is definitely the place to go.
Also, buying in bulk isn’t always a better deal. The two pack of whipped cream at Costco was $8.99 (roughly $4.50 each) but individual cans ranged from $2.77 to $3.49 at Wal-Mart, Superstore and Save-on-Foods.
KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PIES
We bought one pie at each store, but the difference in the size of the pies opened our eyes.
Real Canadian Superstore had the cheapest pie at $4, but it was only 450g. Save-on-Food’s pie was on sale for $4.99 and weighed 623g.
Wal-Mart’s pie was 900g, twice the size of the one at Superstore, and cost $6.97. But Costco’s pie was the whopper at 1.85 kg – more than four times the size of the Superstore pie – and was $6.99.
The lowest price isn’t always the best deal, especially if your family likes pumpkin pie. Watch out for shrinkflation, companies reducing the size or quantity of food items, rather than increasing prices.
SAME ITEMS, DIFFERENT PRICES
Three of the items we bought at Real Canadian Superstore, Save-on-Foods and Wal-Mart were identical: the 1.5 kg Mitchell’s brand ham, Clubhouse Brown Gravy mix and 2L 2% Dairyland milk. But what we paid for each item varied by store.
The ham was on sale for $19.99 as Save-on-Foods (regular $22.99), $17.97 at Wal-Mart and only $15.99 at Superstore. For reference, we paid $17.01 for a 1.5 kg ham at Costco.
The gravy mix was $1.47 at Wal-Mart, on sale for $1 at Save-on-Foods (regular $2.29) and on sale for $0.99 at Superstore (regular $1.25). The gravy at Costco was $6.99 for 775g, or about $0.23 for the equivalent of the 25g Clubhouse packet.
The milk was $4.55 at Save-on-Foods and $4.47 at Superstore and Wal-Mart. A 4L milk at Costco was $5.39.
THE TAKE AWAYS
There was no one store which was consistently cheaper for all items. If we’d planned a different meal, or shopped on a different day, we could have gotten entirely different results.
When we compared prices on staple food items in June, Superstore was the cheapest with a mere $0.42 lead over second place Save-on-Foods. When we did our staple food shop again in September, Real Canadian Superstore had fallen to third place behind Wal-Mart and Save-on-Foods, costing $8.68 more than Wal-Mart for the same list.
Watch for sales and price check items online, as we saw the exact same item can be up to 50 per cent more expensive depending on where you buy it.
THE LIMITS
This test compared prices on a limited number of items, all purchased on a single day, and may not reflect the broader price trends at each respective store. Grocery prices change regularly and sales or other promotions could change the results.
The Citizen is not in a position to measure the quality, taste or nutritional value of the food purchased. Differences in these qualities may account for the price differences.
