Four receipts are stapled to the inside cover of the green notebook right now, two long white ones from Kroger and two shorter ones from Aldi, plus a few little fill-in trips I'm not proud of. For four weeks, from the week before my last day of work through last Sunday, I alternated stores on purpose and kept every scrap.
I've shopped mostly at Kroger for 26 years. It's close, the parking lot is easy, and I know where everything is. But with the paychecks from the school ending June 6, I wanted actual numbers instead of the general feeling everyone has that Aldi is cheaper.
The weekly totals
I bought roughly the same kind of week each time: dinners for two, lunches, coffee, a few household things.
- Week 1, Kroger: $131.40, after $6.75 in digital coupons
- Week 2, Aldi: $98.62
- Week 3, Kroger: $122.08, after $8.10 in coupons
- Week 4, Aldi: $94.15, plus a $9.80 stop at Kroger for the things Aldi didn't have
Kroger averaged $126.74 a week. Aldi averaged $96.39 for the store itself, or $101.29 if I count that one extra run. Call it $25 a week, or about $1,300 a year. That's real money for two people.
I wrote down the prices on ten things we buy almost every week, comparing store brand to store brand:
A gallon of 2% milk was $2.85 at Aldi and $3.19 at Kroger. A dozen large eggs, $4.19 and $4.79. Sandwich bread, $1.49 and $1.79. A pound of butter, $3.89 and $4.49. Boneless chicken breasts, $2.69 a pound and $3.49, though Kroger had them at $1.99 on sale one week. Ground beef, 80/20, $5.29 and $5.99. A 12-ounce bag of ground coffee, $6.99 and $8.49. An 8-ounce bag of shredded cheese, $1.99 and $2.29.
Aldi won every item at regular price. Kroger only won when something was on sale, and then it won big.
Where Aldi is harder for two people
This is the part I didn't expect. Aldi's prices are lower, but a lot of their produce comes in set bags. Three pounds of onions, two pounds of carrots, a big clamshell of lettuce. For a family of four that's fine. For Greg and me, half the bag of lettuce went bad in week two, which is about $1.50 in the trash, and I had to plan meals around using up carrots.
Kroger lets me buy two loose onions, one zucchini, a third of a pound of sliced turkey from the deli counter. When you cook for two, being able to buy exactly what you need is worth something. It's hard to put a number on it, but my waste column was shorter on the Kroger weeks.
Meat was a wash. Aldi's chicken and ground beef were good, and the packages were reasonably sized. Kroger's family packs are cheaper per pound but I'm still learning to split those up right away.
Aldi also didn't carry a few things we use: Greg's particular coffee creamer, the brand of cat food Biscuit will deign to eat, and the good rye bread. Hence the week-four Kroger stop. Biscuit, for the record, has no interest in our budget.
What we decided
We're going to do Aldi as the main weekly shop and Kroger every other week for a smaller trip: loose produce, deli, the items Aldi doesn't carry, and whatever's on a good sale that week. Kroger fuel points also matter to us more than I realized. Greg's F-150 is not small, and the points knocked 40 cents a gallon off one fill-up.
Now that I'm home during the day, the extra stop doesn't cost me much time. I can go at 10 on a Tuesday when the store is quiet. When I was working, I'd have picked one store and lived with it.
If you're trying the same experiment, keep the receipts for the whole month, not just a week. One week told me almost nothing. Four weeks told me a lot.
