Publix vs. Whole Foods

This weekend Laura and I are gunna do a lot of cooking. Tonight we are going to make lamb sliders with baked sweet potato fries. On Saturday Laura is going to make veal meatballs with Gorgonzola pasta and caprese salad. To follow that up she is making some chocolate covered strawberries which should be awesome. On Sunday morning I'm gunna make some homemade Belgian waffles with whip cream and powder sugar. I'll post the recipes for these dishes next week if they turn out good. Sometimes you never know and I don't want to promote something that tastes crappy.

So we went out last night to get all of the stuff for these three meals and it ended up costing us somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 bucks. This is more than we spent on lunches and dinners all week. But what the hell, if we didn't cook at home we would easily be spending that much money going out.

We had to make a couple stops at Publix and Whole Foods, the latter for the ground veal and lamb. Surprisingly, ground veal and lamb aren't too expensive, like 5 to 6 bucks a pound. Another thing that caught me off guard was the price of spices. At Publix you can get small containers of whatever spice you want for $2.50 to $4. To me that is pretty expensive for what you are getting. I mean, there is not a lot of spice in those little containers, but you suck it up and buy them. However, at whole foods it's a different story. I walked down the spice aisle (almost wrote isle) to see how much I saved buying the stuff at publix and realized it was cheaper at whole foods! I got a pretty big thing of coriander for $1.75 which was almost half the price of the stuff at publix, and a lot more of it. The difference was the packaging. The whole foods packaging was in something like a thinner glad-ware while the publix version was in a glass bottle.

This got me to thinking, how much different are the prices between Publix and whole foods? This would be a good science fair experiment for the kids out there. Laura and I looked around, and there really wasn't too much of a difference between the two. Whole foods will charge you a lot more for frozen meals that are claimed to be gourmet. Note to all readers, there is nothing gourmet about frozen meals! Publix also has sales and coupons which greatly lower the prices of some of their products, so on whole you are going to save money going there. Publix also has lower produce prices probably because of the volume they buy it in, and perhaps they go after a slightly lower grade. In this case I will stick with publix because I can always get exactly what I want there. However, for those pantry items like spices I will go to whole foods.

Publix generally beats the meat of Whole Foods.....on price that is. Hahaha, that was super awesome of me. Anyway, publix prices are not far and away better than whole foods on meats and seafood, but like I said before, they go on sale which makes it a much better deal. However, I think you get a better selection of quality meats at whole foods. You are not subjected to crappy scraps they lay out. Obviously you can go to the guy behind the counter and have him cut you a piece, but most of the time I pick up the already wrapped slices. And at publix, you are definitely NOT guaranteed to get a good piece.

Publix and Whole Foods each have significant positives and negatives which sucks for me because now I will feel inclined to go to both stores to do my grocery shopping. Oh well. I guess the only consolation in this is that both places sell beer, so I guess I will double my beer supply. (chugalug!)


God bless this great Country, and death to all her enemies!