Costco Vs. Whole Foods Price List
I recently started shopping more at Whole Foods and noticed how much less food I waste, and also noticed that my grocery bill stayed the same despite buying organic and in general better quality food. I get a little crazy when it comes to tracking things so I couldn't help myself so I ended up pricing 234 common items.
It's just me and my wife so we were really wasting a lot of food shopping at Costco, despite cooking every single meal at home. I was always convinced that Whole Foods would be too expensive because the $/unit price was much higher. However, by only buying exactly what I need I was able to get much better quality with no waste and no increase in cost.
Couple disclaimers, I live in Hawaii, and I priced all of the items at Whole Foods based upon the best quality item available. I chose free range, pasture raised, cage free, organic, local, etc... whenever possible.
On average, unit cost per item at Whole Foods was 2.93x as much as Costco. There were 15 items at Whole Foods that Cost less than similar items at Costco. Costco was missing 98 of the 234 items and Whole Foods was only missing 10 of the 234.
Overall, I'm still going to shop at both Costco and Whole Foods (we eat 10lbs of carrots a week and they cost 276% more per lbs at Whole Foods!), but now I now exactly where I should by which item that we regularly cook with.
Hope this helps somebody out there!
Edit: Here's the spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15X0fJxkq24R0q8Jk0C9ZQ9lMvKzqHPckkCe8npMN-Iw/edit?usp=sharing
January 26, 2019 at 05:06PM
