The same product, priced 29% apart across town
We matched 549 products stocked at three or more grocers in the same city and compared their prices. None of the 549 carries the same price everywhere it is stocked, and the median gap between the cheapest and most expensive stockist is 29%.
- Across 549 identical products stocked at three or more banners, the median gap between the cheapest and dearest price is 29%.
- Zero of the 549 price identically everywhere. Uniform pricing on the grocery shelf is a myth in this market.
- One product in four spreads by 50% or more. At that gap, banner choice matters more than promotion timing.
- For brands, dispersion this wide means one banner is quietly repositioning your product. For allocators, it maps where a grocer’s margin actually lives.
Only 76 of the 549 products, one in seven, stay within 10% of themselves across banners. A third sit 10 to 25% apart. And the tail is heavy: 137 products, a full quarter of everything measured, cost at least half again as much at their most expensive stockist as at their cheapest.
Some of this is honest positioning. A specialty grocer curates, services, and charges for the experience; a larger banner buys better and prices harder. But the width of the spread points elsewhere. A 29% median gap is not a service premium. In a fragmented market nobody can see anybody else's shelf, so nobody prices against it, and dispersion is what an unmeasured market looks like.
The people who can use this are the ones the gap costs. A brand watching its own products spread 40% across a city is watching one banner reposition it without asking. A shopper app would arbitrage this in a week if it had the data. And an investor reading a grocer's margins can see, product by product, where those margins actually live.