Just out curiosity, is a bag of typical household groceries bought from a local grocery store in NYC likely to be insanely expensive, or not too different from what people pay elsewhere in the US?
You might receive a more accurate response if you list a dozen or so common household items for price comparison.
A little more expensive, but not insanely so. The worst deals are at corner bodegas, which while convenient, only sell relatively small quantities for high markup. Regular supermarkets have much better prices, but can be hard to come by in some neighborhoods.
Anecdotal evidence - last year, my family (me, wife, 3 kids) stayed in a friend’s apartment on the Upper East Side for a week. We bought all our groceries at the market a few blocks away - I’d say it was physically about 1/3 the size of the supermarket we normally shop at (in the Boston suburbs) - not a sprawling suburban supermarket, but not a corner store either. It had pretty much the same variety & selection I was used to, just stocked fewer of each item on the shelves. Both times we went in it was full of people doing what looked like normal weekly shopping and walking home, so I’d guess it was the standard market for the local residents. I figured that individual prices ranged from 10-50% higher than what I’d pay at home - it seemed that the smaller the item, the higher the difference. So on average, about 30% higher. As I understand it, this was a pretty expensive area (around 90th & Park), so presumably the difference would be lower in other areas of the city.
As well as specifying which little sub-city (What do they call them? Boroughs?) in NYC. I would imagine that Manhattan would be different than the Bronx.
Not by much.
When I moved to Boston I found the prices significantly higher than what I was used to in suburban Michigan or rural Ohio – maybe 25% more on average. That’s not even in particularly expensive parts of town. So muldoontheif is probably already spending somewhat more than on groceries than many people in other parts of the country.
I shop very little at my local grocery store. On my way home, I walk past a bakery, a fish store, a meat/cheese store, an organic/upscale market, and a regular grocery store. I buy meat/fish/bread/fruit as needed; once a month I drive out to Target in the burbs and stock up on basics, and once a month I hit Trader Joe’s, which is actually in my neighborhood but not walking distance. I ignore the regular grocery store, unless I need to quickly grab something that was forgotten in my regular rounds. I don’t think the ordinary grocery stores have very good prices, especially not compared to the specialty markets that have better selection AND better quality.
Ultimately, my “average bag of groceries” looks nothing like what I had in my bag when I lived in Michigan or rural Virginia – I have entirely different shopping habits.
I live in Queens.
I found Manhattan to be only a bit more expensive than Chicago, except for rent. Like fast food was about 25¢ more per item. K-Mart prices were the same. Duane Reade was identical to Walgreens in Chicago
The thing is NYC has FAR MORE EXPENSIVE things than other cities. For instance, you may top out at $500 for a meal at the fanciest Chicago resturant, but you could go into the thousands in NYC.
I lived in Manhattan for 9 months when I was opening hotels there in the early 00s’ but my rent was paid for, and it was more expensive, but not that much more than Chicago. Maybe a few percentage points 1% - 3%.
As I said, it’s the top out prices that get extreme in NYC. That is whatever the highest price you pay for an item in Chicago, you can find that in NYC the top price for an item can top out a LOT and I mean a LOT more.
I remember I was setting up the office of a CEO and he asked me to help his wife, for a side job. She liked my help so much she brought me a present, a tie.
She said, “If you don’t like it you can take it back and exchange it.”
Well would you believe it was a $400 tie. Who pays $400 for a tie? I mean it’s a nice tie, a silk tie, but $400. I’m scared to wear it as I’d spill something on it in like 2 seconds.
So I took it to the place where it was bought. It wasn’t a store exactly it was a salon and you had to have an appointment to enter it. I couldn’t exchange the tie for anything else as a tie was the cheapest thing they had. Almost all their clothes were made for the person.