Consumer Reports Latest Supermarket Rankings

[storewanderer]

They've done supermarket surveys since the early 90's. Raleys used to always come out in the top 2 or top 3. I never really took these ratings too seriously due to that... Safeway and its banners used to fare better than most Kroger banners. It is interesting how badly they have fallen over the years in these ratings and it does not look like things are getting any better under the Albertsons ownership. Ralphs is the one Kroger banner that has fallen hard in this survey compared with where it was in the 90's. Again that is not really much of a surprise.

[kr.abs.swy]

Consumer Reports is a paid magazine. You can certainly bet whoever was on top paid for the article. They are not very transparent in their research; you get what they want you to see, and it's all opinion-based. Very little facts are involved. For instance, If Jewel-Osco is so bad, why have they been the undisputed #1 in Chicago for so long? If HEB is so bad, why does most of Texas swear by them?

I apologize in advance for being so direct, but this topic (media ethics) is near and dear to my heart. Your statement has absolutely no place here. It can be disproven by spending 15 seconds reading the Wikipedia page about Consumer Reports, where literally the first paragraph says, "The magazine accepts no advertising, pays for all the products it tests, and as a nonprofit organization has no shareholders."

We can certainly question the methodology of Consumer Reports' ratings, and we can debate whether we agree or disagree with their findings, but to make baseless allegations that question Consumer Reports' integrity is not appropriate. If you have evidence to the contrary, you certainly didn't provide it in your post.

[pseudo3d]

Took a snapshot of the open pages of the magazine on the ratings to see what they focused on, and it looks like a lot of the chains at the bottom were hammered due to the perceived high cost of organic foods. I'll upload it soon, but if you don't buy organic foods, then those chains are misplaced.

[wnetmacman]

Consumer Reports is a paid magazine. You can certainly bet whoever was on top paid for the article. They are not very transparent in their research; you get what they want you to see, and it's all opinion-based. Very little facts are involved. For instance, If Jewel-Osco is so bad, why have they been the undisputed #1 in Chicago for so long? If HEB is so bad, why does most of Texas swear by them?

I apologize in advance for being so direct, but this topic (media ethics) is near and dear to my heart. Your statement has absolutely no place here. It can be disproven by spending 15 seconds reading the Wikipedia page about Consumer Reports, where literally the first paragraph says, "The magazine accepts no advertising, pays for all the products it tests, and as a nonprofit organization has no shareholders."

We can certainly question the methodology of Consumer Reports' ratings, and we can debate whether we agree or disagree with their findings, but to make baseless allegations that question Consumer Reports' integrity is not appropriate. If you have evidence to the contrary, you certainly didn't provide it in your post.

Here's some evidence. While a lot of this is subscription related, there are many, MANY complaints about the 'independent' reports that are happening these days.

Consumer Affairs - Complaints on Consumer Reports

I take all complaint sites with a grain of salt, as you're only seeing the angry people, but there are plenty. As I said before, CR tells you what they want you to hear. A single writer or a small group of writers cannot produce a truly unbiased opinion. Even polls can be swayed depending on those who are polled.

Wikipedia is not a fully reliable source for two reasons: it can be edited by anyone, and in most cases, the company can 'erase' the bad things said about it, so it isn't an independent source itself.

My main focus is in saying, as I did before, that it is *extremely* difficult to measure regional supermarkets against one another, because the tastes of a region are different from one region to the next. Additionally, as I also said, measuring Whole Foods against Kroger, or Trader Joe's against Albertsons is an unfair comparison, because each of those are different categories. The same holds true for Aldi/Save A Lot/Lidl/Ruler Foods. They are what is known as a Limited Assortment category, and should not be grouped in with the full line supermarkets like those I named. Therefore, it is an unfair and misleading comparison. According to the complaints about their reports I'm reading, that seems to be very popular among the reporting issues.

Among merchandise, I trust the user reviews on sites like Amazon far more than magazines like CR. CR cannot truly test every single scenario in the time they have to review items. As for supermarkets, I trust the amount of cars in the parking lot and word of mouth wherever I am in my travels.

For the sake of following the rules of the site, let's please steer things back to the subject at hand and discuss the supermarket ratings.

My suggestion: CR should go to the different regions individually and poll from there. That's the only way any supermarket rating system would be truly valid. Even Kroger and Albertsons do some variations by region that would affect their placement in different ways.

[kr.abs.swy]

I went through the first page of the reviews of Consumer Reports on Consumer Affairs. Of the reviews on the first page, going back to fall 2015, more than 20 are subscription related. Two are related to the site's commenting system (or claimed deletion of comments). Two are by writers that disagree with Consumer Reports' findings (but don't claim ethical violations), two are what I would categorize as "rants" and one questions a partnership they use for car ratings. Given millions of subscribers and the fact that these are unverified comments in the first place, I hardly consider this "evidence" that "whoever is on top paid for the article." I'm quite surprised that you won't trust Wikipedia but you will cite these unverified comments, the vast majority of which are about subscription issues, as evidence.

I am not arguing that Consumer Reports is perfect. I'm sure there are ways to improve their methods and clearly they sometimes try to oversimplify something complex and difficult to quantify. But there is a huge difference between disagreeing with their methods and saying "CR tells you what they want you to hear." I agree with you that comparing Walmart and Whole Foods in the same study is pointless. I agree that comparing an urban Safeway in Washington, D.C., with a suburban Fred Meyer in Portland is meaningless. But that doesn't mean that it's appropriate to impugn Consumer Reports' integrity.

I agree that Wikipedia isn't perfect. But I would hope that we can all accept that they are good with basic facts. If you look at the revision history on the Consumer Reports page (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... on=history) you will see that there has been no recent controversy regarding the statement that they accept no advertising, pay for the products they test, or are a nonprofit and that that statement has been in place since 2014. I guess we all will have to make our own decision whether we are going to question what appears to be to be a statement of fact.

I agree with you that we shouldn't stray too far from the purpose of the site. But you introduced new arguments in your post and it seems fair for me to rebut them. I am not introducing any new arguments here.

Consumer Reports is a paid magazine. You can certainly bet whoever was on top paid for the article. They are not very transparent in their research; you get what they want you to see, and it's all opinion-based. Very little facts are involved. For instance, If Jewel-Osco is so bad, why have they been the undisputed #1 in Chicago for so long? If HEB is so bad, why does most of Texas swear by them?

I apologize in advance for being so direct, but this topic (media ethics) is near and dear to my heart. Your statement has absolutely no place here. It can be disproven by spending 15 seconds reading the Wikipedia page about Consumer Reports, where literally the first paragraph says, "The magazine accepts no advertising, pays for all the products it tests, and as a nonprofit organization has no shareholders."

We can certainly question the methodology of Consumer Reports' ratings, and we can debate whether we agree or disagree with their findings, but to make baseless allegations that question Consumer Reports' integrity is not appropriate. If you have evidence to the contrary, you certainly didn't provide it in your post.

Here's some evidence. While a lot of this is subscription related, there are many, MANY complaints about the 'independent' reports that are happening these days.

Consumer Affairs - Complaints on Consumer Reports

I take all complaint sites with a grain of salt, as you're only seeing the angry people, but there are plenty. As I said before, CR tells you what they want you to hear. A single writer or a small group of writers cannot produce a truly unbiased opinion. Even polls can be swayed depending on those who are polled.

Wikipedia is not a fully reliable source for two reasons: it can be edited by anyone, and in most cases, the company can 'erase' the bad things said about it, so it isn't an independent source itself.

My main focus is in saying, as I did before, that it is *extremely* difficult to measure regional supermarkets against one another, because the tastes of a region are different from one region to the next. Additionally, as I also said, measuring Whole Foods against Kroger, or Trader Joe's against Albertsons is an unfair comparison, because each of those are different categories. The same holds true for Aldi/Save A Lot/Lidl/Ruler Foods. They are what is known as a Limited Assortment category, and should not be grouped in with the full line supermarkets like those I named. Therefore, it is an unfair and misleading comparison. According to the complaints about their reports I'm reading, that seems to be very popular among the reporting issues.

Among merchandise, I trust the user reviews on sites like Amazon far more than magazines like CR. CR cannot truly test every single scenario in the time they have to review items. As for supermarkets, I trust the amount of cars in the parking lot and word of mouth wherever I am in my travels.

For the sake of following the rules of the site, let's please steer things back to the subject at hand and discuss the supermarket ratings.

My suggestion: CR should go to the different regions individually and poll from there. That's the only way any supermarket rating system would be truly valid. Even Kroger and Albertsons do some variations by region that would affect their placement in different ways.