Brit here.
I’ve never seen milk in the UK sold by anything referring to a “Gallon”. Traditional is by the pint from the milkman, more usual these days is a plastic bottle or Tetrapak-style container for 1 or 2 litres. You get bigger ones but those are usually bought for larger families.
http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/shelves/Fresh_Milk_In_Tesco.html
The gallon is pretty popular in the U.S.; the half-gallon is popular in urban areas where people have to carry groceries home; the quart a distant 3rd. The quart or half-gallon usually cost more proportionally, and sometimes cost more, period when there is a sale on gallons. Example: you might see the Quart for $2.89, half gallon for $3.29, and the gallon for $3.79, but then the gallon goes on sale, and is $3, making it cheaper than the half-gallon.
Most stores do not offer the full selection in the 1Q container. For instance, you might be able to get whole milk in 1Q, but not 2% milk. Or vice versa. You might have to buy the half-gallon if you’re particular. Shelf-stable UHT milk in the box container has not caught on in the US. It’s available, usually, but not popular.
Yeah, I think the first time I became aware of this was during the film “Clerks”. There’s a person that goes through all the milk bottles trying to find one magical one that is way more in date and is going to last a century or something. All I could think about was how big the bottles were, how it was just way to much milk. Who needed that much milk? What did they do, bathe in it?
Milk sold at any American convenience store is very expensive compared to the price in a regular grocery store, but it’s handy for a parent to grab on the way home, after filling up the gas tank, because every American child is expected to drink udders of milk on a regular basis! I can tell you from personal experience, it isn’t properly refrigerated or something because it goes bad REALLY fast. Maybe by looking at the dates, one can avoid spoilage for a day or two more.
Don’t forget that a US gallon is smaller than a Canadian/UK gallon. When I lived in Ontario, the only place I could get gallons of milk was the 7-Eleven, otherwise it came in bags. Oh, and that was a US gallon, marketed at being 3.78 liters.
Here in Mexico milk is also sold in gallon and half gallon sizes, in the same plastic jugs we use in the States (of course, market in liters). I wonder if this has to do with American integrators building the bottling plants, or economics of scale, or what.
Not always. Until a year or two ago, I used to regularly stop at a convenience store specifically because they had the best prices on milk and ice cream. Everything else was too expensive to consider buying there. They’ve since upped their prices so that WalMart is now cheapest, but the convenience store is still cheaper than some other local supermarket chains.
A couple of years ago when gas briefly flirted with the $4.00/gallon level, food prices generally rose a bunch (or underwent exposure to what the Consumerist calls the “shrink ray”. When gas prices fell back down (at least temporarily), it appears that the food prices stayed elevated. Many of the staples such as bread and pasta seem maybe 25% more expensive than they were just a couple of years ago.
I tried to look for a few consumer price indices to support my impressions of the situation, but a couple of minutes of Googling wasn’t sufficient, so you’ll have to rely on a cranky middle-aged guy’s anecdotes about how stuff was cheaper in the old days.
We go through about 3 gallons a week. 3 people in our family, my daughter and I being the two big milk drinkers.
amanset, milk delivery by milkmen has been rare in the U.S. since the 1960’s (or maybe it was the 1950’s). People mostly buy milk in gallon containers during weekly supermarket visits, I think. With single people, like me, I suspect that this means that occasionally if you don’t use milk on a few days you will end up throwing out some milk.
I think this depends on what you’re buying. Whole Foods sales are excellent, IMO. I can get a pound of organic apples for $1.50, or a pound of regular apples at my usual grocery for $1.25, and the regular apples are larger, so I may throw some away. The bulk bins of rice, oats, quinoa, nuts, flours, couscous, etc are much cheaper at Whole Foods than buying them at my regular grocery. Trader Joe’s has very cheap canned goods as well; their store brand is vastly superior to the mid-level brand at my regular grocery, for the same or slightly lower price. Trader Joe’s also has a very nice, reasonably priced selection of coffee. Obviously the stores can’t compete if you’re doing bargain-basement shopping, but Aldi’s and such kills the average grocery store on that front anyways.
As JoelUpchurch noted, one thing that may be skewing prices is that many Americans don’t shop for their groceries at grocery stores anymore. In my personal experience, families will buy the bulk of their groceries at warehouse retailers like Costco or discount stores like Walmart. They only venture out to Safeway and Albertson’s for last minute purchases or more obscure items. Those stores don’t have much of a presence in larger compact cities like Chicago or NYC, which is why prices are much higher in big cities.
Something else I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned is that comparing straight price to price, even with all the tweaking the OP did, is misleading: a comparison of purchasing power is more difficult, but more realistic in terms of telling you how well people live, eat, etc. If I’m paying 3.00 for one box of MyFaveStuff in Country A and I make 3K/month, and I pay 1.00 for one box (same size) of MyFaveStuff in Country B and I make 1K/month (same job), then I have the same purchasing power in both.
I’ve had moves where my salary got cut down to 1/3 but my purchasing power soared. The monetary value of my monthly savings became lower as well, but what I could buy with those savings in the second country was again much more than what I would have been able to buy with the old savings in the first country.
I’d add Winco and Super Walmart.