Comparing grocery prices is no easy task these days – Winnipeg Free Press

The Macro

Those who know me well know that I am a relentless online price comparison shopper.

On high-priced items (cars, travel, electronics, home improvements), I can spend weeks trying to figure out how and where to find the best price.

For smaller items, I do less price comparisons, but I still try to keep an eye on what I’m buying and at what price.

Obviously, groceries are a basic commodity and we should all be doing price comparisons. However, if you’ve tried it recently, you know it’s very difficult.

I usually split my big grocery purchases between Superstore and Costco. Before going to the store, I like to go online to check for special offers and compare identical products in both stores.

This is not an easy task.

Case in point: last weekend we needed toilet paper. I went online to check prices at Superstore and found that our favorite brand, Purex, was on sale. The current deal was 24 triple rolls (marketed as the equivalent of 72 single rolls) for $18.99. Costco, on the other hand, had a 40-pack of “giant” rolls on sale for $23.99.

You’re probably wondering, “Dan, what is a giant roll and how does it compare to a triple roll?” I’m glad you asked.

I dug into the product specs on the Superstore site and found that the triple rolls are described as having 363 sheets, while the double rolls have 242 sheets. However, at Costco, Purex describes a giant roll as having 250 sheets.

Once you do the math (and I did), you get this: Superstore’s 24-pack of triple rolls equals 8,712 sheets of toilet paper ($0.00218 per sheet), while Costco’s 40-pack of giant rolls provides 10,000 sheets, allowing $0.00240 per sheet, up 10 percent. (Fortunately, the sheets for both products are listed as the same size, so we don’t have to start calculating square footage!)

The big problem is that all this math takes a lot of time. But it can be done if, and here’s the big if, you can get prices online at every store you want to visit.

Costco does not offer online pricing for many of its staples. For example: We buy individual slices of Kirkland brand cheddar cheese because it is a very good product and is generally much cheaper than comparable Superstore products. But it is impossible to find out the current price without visiting the store.

A search for “Kirkland cheddar cheese wedges” returned four pages of results for almost everything except cheese slices. I got prices on bedding, a pool volleyball game, a huge pack of Honey Nut Cheerios, and my personal favorite, a universal kayak carrier kit. whatever it is

This forces me to visit Costco first, in person, and use my phone to price check their products against Superstore’s online products.

Not only is this really tiring, but it puts you in danger if you can’t find a safe place to be and browse your phone. Depending on how busy Costco is, it’s like looking up directions on Google Maps while in the middle of a freeway.

Is Costco hiding prices online? The Motley Fool, one of the web’s most popular personal finance sites, said Costco says it doesn’t put much of its inventory online for price comparison purposes because there’s a lot of turnover, making it difficult to post accurate prices. .

This seems like a pretty weak argument, given that the turnover of a large chain like Superstore would be comparable to Costco.

A recent Motley Fool article suggested using the online shopping service Instacart to get price comparisons, but the prices charged by shopping services differ from store prices and don’t help you sort through the confusion around packaging and units of different sizes.

Many economists and grocery price watchers think that the unit price, presented alongside the selling price, is a way to overcome this confusion and guard against “contraction inflation,” a widespread trend where manufacturers are slowly reducing the size of the packets as they increase. prices (I’m talking to you, Häagen-Dazs!)

However, unit prices are not consistently displayed in Canadian grocery stores, largely because only Quebec requires it by law. Efforts to create national regulation have somewhat failed.

And, as I demonstrated with toilet paper, unit pricing only works if the units are the same size. Once the units vary, you’re in another layer of calculation.

In the age of the Interweb, this should be much easier. But it’s not, and it’s no accident.