My $71 Dollar Store Basket Beat the $94 Kroger Cart — Four Items Flipped the Math

Forty-four items. I laid the two receipts side by side at 10:20 on a Wednesday night in June with a legal pad, a pen, and my wife's calculator app, because she said our grocery bill had become a feeling and I said it was a number, and only one of us was going to be right. The receipts were from the same week. Same list, my handwriting, two stores, eleven miles apart on Route 9.

Groceries ran us $610 a month for a family of four, up from $505 the prior year, and my wife had started doin' the thing where she rounds the weekly total up in her head and winces. So I bought the identical 44-item list twice: once at the Dollar General on Route 9 on June 3, once at the Kroger on Mill Street on June 5. Store brands against store brands. Milk against milk. The totals went on the fridge: $71.28 against $94.61.

The totals said Dollar General wins the whole game. The unit prices said it wins most of it, and hides four losses inside the basket, and one of those losses was coffee, which is the item I was most sure about and most wrong about. Tape on the fridge holds receipts. A legal pad holds the part where I got humbled.

44 items, one list

The list was our actual week, not a stunt list: cereal, milk, eggs, bread, pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, apples, bananas, ground turkey, frozen peas, snacks for two lunchboxes, paper goods, cleaning supplies, coffee, and the long tail of a real pantry. Where brands existed at both stores I bought the store brand on each side. Identical sizes where the shelf had them. Where sizes differed, I wrote the size down, and that turned out to be where the whole story lived.

the receipts taped to the fridge

Dollar General, June 3: 44 items, $71.28, plus $11.40 of app discounts the register congratulated me for. Kroger, June 5: same 44 items, $94.61 after the Plus card knocked off $2.10. The gap was $23.33 a week, call it 25 percent, call it $1,200 a year if it held. My wife took the receipts down once to wipe the fridge and put them back in the same corners. She was invested now.

trash bags, $1.25 for eight

Dollar General sells an eight-pack of 13-gallon trash bags for $1.25, which is 15.6 cents a bag and looks like the best deal in the building. Kroger's flex box is 40 bags for $4.99, which is 12.5 cents a bag. The eight-pack loses by 25 percent, and we go through about 30 bags a month with a toddler in the house, so the loss compounds weekly. I bought the eight-packs for two years. Nobody at either store stopped me.

dish soap, 25 cents an ounce

Same shape of trick, different aisle: Dollar General's slight dish soap bottle is 5 ounces for $1.25, which is 25 cents an ounce. Kroger's 28-ounce bottle of their own brand is $3.49, which is 12.5 cents an ounce. Half the price, ounce for ounce, and dish soap is not somethin' you use less of cuz the bottle was cheap. That $1.25 price point reads cheap at the shelf and bills expensive by the ounce.

paper towels and coffee

Paper towels: a two-roll pack at Dollar General runs $1.25 for about 170 two-ply sheets, 0.74 cents a sheet, against Kroger's 12-roll bundle at $16.99 for 2,520 sheets, 0.67 cents a sheet. Coffee hurt worst: the 8.3-ounce bag of house ground at Dollar General ran $2.25, which is 27 cents an ounce, while Kroger's 30.9-ounce can of the same roast tier was $7.49, 24.2 cents an ounce. We brew two pots a day in this house. I had been paying a premium for slight bottles and slight bags and calling it thrift.

four flips out of 44

I ran unit prices on the 12 staples where sizes actually differed, and Dollar General won eight of 'em: cereal, pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, peanut butter, frozen peas, cleaning spray, and the off-brand soda my wife pretends is for the kids. Kroger won four: trash bags, dish soap, paper towels, coffee. Every flip lived in the same part of the store, the bulk-sized endcaps, where the dollar store's small-format model cannot follow. Four losses outta 44 is still a win. It is also a map of where to shop for what.

four things back on the shelf

On June 24 I stood in the paper goods aisle at Dollar General and put four things back: the coffee, the trash bags, the dish soap, the paper towels. Then I bought them at Kroger the same afternoon for $13.12 total, which felt odd, like cheating on a store I had been loyal to for budget reasons. The revised split run: $66.90 at Dollar General for 40 items, $13.12 at Kroger for four, $80.02 all-in against the old $94.61. That is $14.59 back every single week.

the calculator on June 30

Fourteen fifty-nine a week is $758 over a year, which is a car insurance payment or six months of the dog's heartworm pills, and my wife entered it into her phone with the facial expression of a woman revising an opinion. The legal pad page went up on the fridge next to the receipts, a column named where next to a column named what. Groceries are a number now. Four items are Kroger's business. That is the whole audit.