Tracking DC-area grocery store prices and quality over a decade
At the end of 2025, Consumers’ Checkbook wrapped up our latest grocery store price and quality report, and we figured this community would want to see the numbers, especially given how rough the last few years have been at checkout.
Our undercover price shoppers physically walked store aisles with a 150-item shopping list and priced everything out, and thousands of DMV residents ranked each store for overall quality in our survey.
One big thing we noticed when we started comparing our 2015 report to our latest is that we had to raise our reference family budget from $200/week to $300/week just to reflect what people are spending now. That's before we even started to look at which stores have the lowest prices.
Comparing 2015 vs 2025:
- The gap between the cheapest and most expensive stores in the DMV has grown from ~$5,300 to nearly $7,800 a year for a typical family.
- ALDI and Lidl win on price. If your family shops at ALDI, you’re saving an average of $5,600 each year. Lidl didn’t debut in our research until 2018, when it came in at a whopping 40% below average prices at all our other surveyed stores. It’s now at 21% below average in our latest report.
- Wegmans has been consistent, and it’s pretty rare for a high-quality store to also be a relative bargain for 10 years straight.
- Since Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, its "superior overall quality" rating in our consumer surveys dropped from over 90% to 65%. Even though it’s cheaper than it used to be, people have noticed the quality slide.
One more thing worth knowing regardless of where you shop: Swapping about a third of your cart to store brands saves around 8% now, up from 5% in 2015. The store-brand options have improved, too.
We're Consumers' Checkbook, a DC-area nonprofit that does hands-on consumer research. The full grocery store report, including how local shops rank, is on our site. Happy to answer any questions about how we approached this project.