What’s the first piece of advice for writers? “Write about what you know.” Well, after three months of living in Poland on a tight budget and preparing all of my meals at home, I know Polish supermarkets.
In Europe generally, supermarket food is very cheap compared with the United States. A friend of mine who lives in Slovenia delights in texting me photos of the spoils from her latest grocery shopping trip and asking me to guess what it all cost. And my replies, at least until I started exploring Europe myself, were always way too high.
Polish supermarkets are easy on the wallet as well. But the exceptional skinflints among us, from penniless backbackers to funemployed digital nomads like me, naturally want to know if there are significant price differences between different supermarket chains, and if so, which is the cheapest.
Well, I have done the research. Bottom line up front: Aldi is the cheapest. If that’s all you wanted, you can stop reading now.
But I like details, so I’m going to press on. In several previous posts, I’ve mentioned how much I like Numbeo, the wonderful Serbian website that offers up crowdsourced cost of living and quality of life data for cities and countries all over the world for free. So, before I left the lovely city of Poznań, Poland, I decided to give back and contribute some data to them on the cost of living there.
Numbeo bases its supermarket cost data on a “basket” of goods that, aside from beer, wine, and cigarettes, consists essentially of ingredients, or raw materials for cooking. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Milk. Cheese. Eggs. Rice. Beef. Chicken.
(Note that this is a somewhat Eurocentric sample. Fresh milk and cheese are prohibitively expensive in East Asia, for example. People there buy powdered milk, soymilk, or tofu instead. The high prices of dairy products skew Numbeo’s sample and result in overly high supermarket cost estimates in Asia, in my opinion. But I digress.)
In addition to the Numbeo basket items, I was also curious about the cost of processed foods in Poznań’s supermarkets. As I visited various supermarkets and convenience stores collecting data on 13-14 February 2019, I also wrote down prices for items like chocolate bars, breakfast cereal, canned beans, potato chips, and spaghetti sauce, and factored these numbers into my calculations. And this being Poland, I made sure I got price data for local specialties like prepared pierogi and Żubrówka “bison grass” vodka.
Furthermore, I wanted to know how Polish convenience store prices stacked up against supermarkets. It’s common knowledge in the U.S. that convenience-store food is more expensive than supermarket food (you’re paying for the convenience, after all), but is the same true in Poland?
Convenience Stores
The answer is: Yes. While prices in Polish convenience stores are very reasonable compared to their U.S. peers, they’re significantly more expensive than Polish supermarkets. More interestingly, however, there’s a large price differential between the two biggest Polish convenience store chains: Żabka and Jeżyk.
Żabka
Żabka convenience stores are as ubiquitous in Polish cities as CVS stores are in American cities. There’s one roughly every other block. Żabka’s product line, however, is closer to 7-Eleven than to CVS. You can’t find much in the way of health and beauty products at a Żabka, but you can buy food, alcohol (Poles consume staggering quantities of alcohol, bless their Catholic hearts), and magazines.
Żabkas are small and cramped, but very brightly lit. The clerk at the first Żabka I visited for my price research confronted me and yelled at me in Polish as I stalked the aisles, writing down prices in my little purple Moleskine notebook. The only word she said that I understood was sklep, or store. But I got the gist: “This is a store, not a research library. If you’re not going to buy anything, get out!”
Fortunately, as I mentioned above, there’s a Żabka every other block in downtown Poznań, so I ducked into this one to price spaghetti and spaghetti sauce, that one for milk and bottled water, etc., and eventually collected all the data I needed.
The results speak for themselves: Items for sale at Żabka cost 56% more on average than the same or comparable items on the shelves of your typical supermarket (i.e. Biedronka, Lidl, or Aldi). A can of kidney beans (400g total weight, 240g minus liquid) costs 5.25 złoty (zł; US$1.37 based on the average exchange rate for 13-14 February 2019) at Żabka, versus 2.99 zł ($0.78) at Jeżyk and 1.99 zł ($0.52) at Biedronka. The cheapest liter of milk at Żabka costs 2.99 zł ($0.78) compared with 2.29 zł ($0.60) at Jeżyk and 1.89 zł ($0.49) at Lidl and Aldi.
Jeżyk
Jeżyk convenience stores are even tinier than Żabkas and are poorly lit and incredibly cramped. Passing another customer in one of the aisles (there are only two) is a lot like a game of Twister. Jeżyk sells basically the same selection of food, alcohol, and magazines as Żabka, but at Jeżyk these items are even more likely to lack price labels or to be jumbled together under the wrong label. That made my data collection difficult. On the other hand, the darkness helped. I got all of my research done at the first Jeżyk I entered, above.
Jeżyk, as it turns out, is a much better bet for affordable convenience store groceries than Żabka. Goods at Jeżyk cost 23% more than comparables at discount supermarkets. Jeżyk is even a slightly (3%) cheaper place to buy groceries than upmarket supermarket Piotr i Paweł. The cheapest 100g chocolate bar at Jeżyk, for example, costs 2.99 zł ($0.78), the same price as Piotr i Pawel and actually cheaper than the least expensive chocolate bar at Biedronka (3.49 zł; $0.91). Although those looking for the cheapest chocolate fix in Poland are better off at Aldi (1.69 zł; $0.44) or Lidl (2.19 zł; $0.57).
Supermarkets
Urban supermarkets (I conducted all my research in Poznań’s stare miasto, or old city; I don’t set foot in suburbs if I can avoid it) in Poland are much smaller than their American peers. Their aisles are constantly clogged with pallets and employees restocking shelves. Each one has an aisle or two of Walmart-type bric-a-brac: Wire shelves containing a jumble of bras, canned dog food, picture books, clearance-priced energy drinks, and the like.
The shopping experience is not the greatest, in my opinion, but their selection is almost always adequate and the price is inevitably right.
Aldi
Aldi is a Europe-wide chain (they also moved into the Washington, D.C. market shortly before I left, if memory serves) and is the winner, somewhat to my surprise, of my “cheapest supermarket in Poland” (specifically, Poznań) award.
But the data speak for themselves. Although Aldi was usually not the outright cheapest place to buy any particular item, it was most often either tied for cheapest, or it was second-cheapest behind Biedronka or Lidl. Aldi is the cheapest supermarket to buy onions at, at 3.39 zł per kg ($0.40 per lb), edging Biedronka (3.49 zł/kg; $0.41/lb). Cooking oil is also cheapest at Aldi, coming in at 3.99 zł ($1.04) for a 1L bottle. The same oil costs 4.69 zł ($1.22) at both Lidl and Biedronka.
Lidl
Lidl is another pan-European grocery chain. My basket of goods costs 5% more here than at Aldi. When I visited, Lidl had far and away the cheapest oranges, at 2.49 zł/kg ($0.29/lb), blowing its nearest rival, Biedronka (3.79 zł/kg; $0.45/lb) out of the water. Lidl also sells the cheapest 0.5 kg loaf of white bread, at 1.59 zł ($0.41), beating out second-place Aldi (1.79 zł; $0.47).
Biedronka
Biedronka certainly seems to be the most prevalent supermarket chain in Poland, at least in the urban areas that I frequent. It’s also arguably the smallest and most cluttered of Poland’s supermarkets, although Aldi and Lidl aren’t huge improvements. On one particularly crowded day in the Biedronka above, I was leaning over to inspect some tomatoes (a Polish babcia, or grandma, was in the way, so I couldn’t stand right in front of them) when another grandma brushed past me with her cart. I lost my balance, flailed a bit trying to regain it, and finally fell flat on my ass in the middle of the aisle, almost knocking the babcia next to me over too. Overall, a mortifying experience. Incidents like that almost make it worth paying a premium to shop the broad avenues of Piotr i Paweł, below. Almost.
But Biedronka is cheap. It’s basically in a dead heat with Lidl for second place, costing about 6% more than Aldi for a comparable basket of goods. Biedronka is the best place to pick up a 500ml bottle of Żubrówka “bison grass” vodka, the finest (mass market) Polish vodka — and therefore the best mass market vodka in the world, period — as it costs just 19.99 zł ($5.21). (It’s called “bison grass” because it’s lightly flavored with, and each bottle includes a blade of grass from, the Białowieża Forest on the Poland-Belarus border, the only place in Europe, outside of zoos, where wild bison roam.) Buy it at Aldi or Lidl and it’ll cost you an extra złoty ($0.26).
Biedronka is also the cheapest place to buy potato chips, if you’re not fussy about the brand. Lay’s chips cost the same pretty much everywhere (4.49 zł [$1.17] for a 165g bag), but Biedronka features the cheapest 140g bag of Polish domestic brand potato chips at 1.74 zł ($0.45). Its nearest rival is Aldi (2.09 zł; $0.54). And Biedronka’s the home of the 2.99 zł ($0.78) head of lettuce, beating out Piotr i Paweł (3.99 zł; $1.04).
Piotr i Paweł
I love Piotr i Paweł (“Peter and Paul”). Its aisles — boulevards, really — are wide and uncluttered. At least on the few times I visited, it was never crowded. The two I’m familiar with are both large, almost American-sized stores inside gleaming shopping malls: specifically, Stary Browar in downtown Poznań and Avenida Poznań next to the railway station.
I suppose that’s why I like Piotr i Paweł so much. I love an authentic foreign cultural experience as much as anyone, but when it comes to doing chores and running errands, I like things to be familiar, so I can get done what I need to get done and get out. And as much as I dislike suburbs, I grudgingly admit that cavernous American suburban supermarkets, discount stores, and box stores offer the best shopping experience. Venturing out to the ‘burbs and spending an hour loading up your cart at Costco is a quintessentially American cultural experience that everyone should try at least once. But I digress.
Piotr i Paweł, because its stores are so large, blows away the other urban Polish supermarkets in terms of selection. Their wine selection is as good as Whole Foods Market, and their craft beer selection is better. And, of course, they don’t feature Whole Foods’ wallet-rapingly high prices.
By Polish standards, though, Piotr i Paweł is expensive. 31% more expensive than Aldi, to be precise. 400g of refrigerated pierogis will cost you 6.99 zł ($1.82) at Piotr i Paweł, compared to 4.29 zł ($1.12) at Aldi and Lidl and 4.49 zł ($1.17) at Biedronka. The cheapest 10-pack of eggs (Poles like their eggs in cartons of 10 rather than 12; maybe it’s a metric system thing) costs 5.99 zł ($1.56) at Piotr i Paweł and 3.99 zł ($1.04) at the other three stores.
Now of course there are more than four supermarket chains in Poland. French supermarket Carrefour and British supermarket Tesco are both in the Polish market too, to name just two. But at least in Poznań, they’re out in the suburbs, which is out of my jurisdiction. In terms of urban supermarkets, Biedronka, Aldi, Lidl, and Piotr i Paweł are your choices. Choose wisely.