The Price War That's Finally Reaching Your Grocery Aisle

Walmart is the largest supermarket in the United States by a wide margin. It also has the lowest customer satisfaction scores in the industry. Yet in internal industry studies, Walmart is simultaneously the most trusted supermarket in the country. How do you square that? Clark Howard's answer is simple: price. "When we've been through a cycle of inflation that unfortunately has heated back up," he says, "the price of groceries is people are just struggling to pay everyday bills comes front and center." Trust, in this environment, means something different than satisfaction. It means delivering on the one thing people need most right now.

The Grocery Price War and the Private Label Shift

Market share is moving decisively toward the low-price players. Walmart dominates, but Costco is on the edge of becoming the nation's second-largest supermarket chain. Aldi and Lidl are also taking share. That leaves traditional chains like Kroger—which operates under roughly two dozen different names around the country—at an enormous competitive disadvantage. Kroger's response is to cut prices on thousands of items, with special emphasis on private label goods. That's where the fight is central right now, because Americans are buying store brands in much larger numbers than they used to, more like the rest of the world.