My wife and I love Malaysia and we are so grateful that we've been allowed to stay in this country during the pandemic, even though our social visit pass has expired.
And because we're spending so much time here we're doing a lot of grocery shopping, and so I wanted to find out which grocery store has the cheapest prices.
I went to four different grocery stores to compare prices.
The stores are Cold Storage, Giant, Jaya and Tesco.
I went to these stores in Penang.
There are other grocery store chains but these are the four that were most accessible to me.
I took a random list of 14 items and compared the prices at all four of these stores.
Now I recognize that this is probably not a typical shopping list of what someone would actually buy in a supermarket.
These are just random items, and I know the results could be very different depending on what somebody is actually buying compared to the random items on this list.
A quick disclaimer, I had to make a few minor price adjustments so that the products can be compared with each other.
Prices at these stores can change over time, sometimes products are on sale, and prices can differ by city.
All right let's get to the prices at the grocery stores.
I'm going to go through the list in alphabetical order, here we go.
A one kilogram bunch of bananas were cheapest at both Tesco and Giant at 3.99 per kilogram at both of those stores.
A small loaf of bread was cheapest at Cold Storage, 2.35.
A pack of Anchor butter was cheapest at Cold Storage and Giant, both at 9.95.
One kilogram of carrots was cheapest at Giant at 2.50.
Next we have one kilogram of chicken breast cheapest at Jaya at 21.95 cents. Now giant had run out of chicken breast so I took the prices for fillets and adjusted it a little bit so this could be a little bit off here.
Next we have crackers and this time Giant didn't have the same brand so I had to choose the brand that I thought was closest but Tesco was the cheapest at 3.99.
The croissant was cheapest at Tesco 1.10, and I especially love the chocolate flavor myself.
A pack of 10 eggs was cheapest at Jaya, 4.90.
A one kilogram bag of flour was cheapest at Tesco, 2.29.
A carton of milk was also cheapest at Tesco, 7 ringgit even.
Next we have a five kilogram bag of jasmine rice 28.99 at Jaya.
A 25 pack of tea was cheapest at Tesco 3.50. And we by the way loved going to the tea plantation for this tea in Cameron Highlands.
Okay two more items, tomatoes were the same price at Cold Storage, Tesco and Giant, all around 4 ringgit.
And finally a bottle of 100 plus was cheapest at Giant, 3.10.
All right let's find out the winner.
If you were to actually buy everything on this list, if you add it all up the winner for the store with the cheapest total price is...
Giant! The total cost at Giant was about 104 ringgit.
This was followed by Tesco at around 109 ringgit, next is Jaya at 111 ringgit, and then Cold Storage at 114 ringgit.
Now I know that there are other things to consider besides just the price.
Some stores might have better quality products, shorter wait times, they might be cleaner or do a better job at keeping the store stocked.
I also want to be clear that I am just stating the prices that I observed and not trying to promote or favor one store over the others.
I also want to say that we have personally had very good experiences at the local markets and the wet markets.
We find the produce is often fresher, better quality, and we like supporting the vendors who work at these local markets.
We find the vendors to be very helpful and friendly.
So what surprised me the most as an American is how close the prices were between the stores because back in the us there can be much bigger price differences.
So I hope this video has been helpful.
Please check out some of the other videos that we've made about our life here in Malaysia, and also please stay healthy and take care of yourselves.