UFC-Que Choisir investigated the differences in the prices of your groceries when you order online and go to the store.
Shopping online is now commonplace for many French people. For those who do not live near a supermarket, the official store application is a godsend for being able to look at prices and possibly do shopping without having to take the car. Drive solutions are also very popular with many users who do not want to waste time in store aisles and shelves. All they have to do is simply place an order from their shopping list and pay for them to collect them from the parking lots of major retailers.
However, users sometimes wonder about the profitability of such a phenomenon. What interest would large stores have in offering this service which deprives them of possible unexpected purchases from their customers lost in their departments? Members of the UFC-Que Choisir association decided to investigate whether shopping online was necessarily more expensive than going to a store. The result of their latest investigation was very surprising on many points.
If home delivery entails costs (which decrease depending on the amount of your shopping) which make your shopping rather expensive, the drive does not have this pitfall. To carry out its investigation, UFC-Que Choisir based itself on a vague variety of products distributed across more than 1,300 stores of multiple brands such as Leclerc, Carrefour, Casino, Monoprix, Auchan, Intermarché and the U system brands. average price of shopping carried out online compared to the same shopping carried out in store varied relatively little… With the exception of one brand.
The average in-store price compared to the average drive-thru price generally varies between 0% (for Leclerc) and 1% (for Monoprix). Carrefour and Auchan also show a small added value on drive-thru prices with +0.3% and 0.8% respectively. Only Intermarché and the U supermarkets display lower in-store prices than their drive-thru counterparts with -0.3% and -0.7% respectively.
The Casino brand, on the other hand, broke all records in the survey. The prices of products in store would be on average 17% more expensive compared to the prices of the same products ordered through a drive solution. Questioned on the subject by UFC-Que Choisir, Casino also confirms this difference in prices “even if it tends to be reduced.”
The brand indicates, however, that its own readings turn out to be a little less significant and are closer to the order of a 9% higher price in store. The explanation? The brand offers identical prices for all its drives in mainland France, with the exception of Ile-de-France and its ordering site displays lower prices than in stores. A strategy to attract new customers?