These Philly grocery stores will be easiest on your wallet this holiday season

If you don’t want to break the bank hosting Thanksgiving dinner or welcoming ravenous college students back home this week, you may want to shop at Grocery Outlet or Walmart, the two least expensive grocery chains in the area.

That’s according to a recent Consumers’ Checkbook study that compared the prices of 20 grocery stores and delivery services in the Philadelphia region.

Grocery Outlet ranked at the top of Checkbook’s list, with prices about 20% lower than the average at all other surveyed stores and locations in North Philadelphia, South Philadelphia, Mount Airy, Sharon Hill, and Delran. Families who typically spend $250 a week at an average-priced grocer would save $2,600 if they shopped at Grocery Outlet, according to Checkbook.

However, it may not have all the items on your list.

Grocery Outlet “offers a somewhat odd assortment of steeply discounted surplus national-brand products,” wrote Kevin Brasler, the executive editor of Checkbook, a nonprofit publication for consumers. One Outlet location had only 27% of the 154 common items for which Checkbook was shopping, he said.

The second-cheapest option, Walmart, has prices about 17% lower than the all-store average, according to the study, and has more locations across the city and suburbs. There are 38 Walmart stores in the Philadelphia area.

Delawareans can also shop at Food Lion, where Checkbook found prices to be 10% lower than the average. It has locations in Wilmington and Claymont.

Neither Grocery Outlet nor Walmart could be reached for comment Monday.

“Food Lion has a more than 60-year history of offering high-quality, low-priced groceries in the towns and cities we serve,” a store spokesperson said. “We know our neighbors are counting on us more than ever to offer affordable products to help them nourish their families.”

Shoppers are expected to be looking for more deals this holiday season due to record-high inflation, the likes of which haven’t been seen in decades. Food prices nationwide have jumped more than 12% in the past year, and some holiday-meal staples are among the items seeing the steepest increases.

One grocery manager told The Inquirer earlier this month that balancing pricing and profit margins “has gone from a problem to … all we think about.”

After Grocery Outlet, Walmart, and Food Lion, these are the stores in the Philadelphia area where prices were lower than the all-store average, ordered from less expensive to more expensive:

The list of more expensive supermarkets looks much the same as it did in 2018, when Checkbook last did a grocery store comparison for the Philadelphia region.

However, Wegmans has become more expensive. In 2018, its prices were 3% lower than the all-store average. This year, prices there were 18% higher. The change prompted Checkbook to re-survey Wegmans, Brasler wrote, but they found the same result a second time.

Over the same period, ShopRite has lowered prices, falling off of this list entirely.

Neither Wegmans nor ShopRite could be reached for comment Monday .

These are the stores in the Philadelphia area where prices were higher than the all-store average, ordered from more expensive to less expensive:

Not many Philadelphia-region shoppers are excited about their grocery stores, the study found.

“Unlike in the other metro areas where we publish Checkbook, there are comparably few chains in the Delaware Valley area that get high ratings from their surveyed customers for the quality of their produce or meat or for overall quality,” Brasler wrote.

Checkbook received 2,204 consumer responses total, though the number of respondents differed by store. Some chains, such as Giant and ShopRite, had more than 500 responses, while Food Lion had 28.

Wegmans, the region’s second-most-expensive store, got the highest overall-quality marks from consumers Checkbook surveyed, with 86% of 275 shoppers rating the chain “superior.”

Whole Foods, the most expensive, was called “superior” by 80% of the 95 survey respondents, while McCaffrey’s got the same classification from 84% of 35 respondents.