Methodology of the commissary comparison - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

Methodology of the commissary comparison

For our price comparison, we began by visiting commissaries and talking to 10 randomly selected people with large grocery loads about their food shopping patterns.

Related

Check out our commissary comparison

Then we asked them to give us their commissary receipts. Our reporters then went on the same day to the first large chain store outside the military installation’s main gate or a gate close to housing, and gathered price data on the same items on the commissary receipts.

We broke that mold once. Since Wal-Marts have become such a looming presence near so many bases, we did one comparison at a Wal-Mart “supercenter” six miles from Fort Meade, Md., that was not the closest supermarket to that base.

By law, commissaries stock only name brands. So we actually did two comparisons: one pitting commissary name-brand items against the same name-brand items in off-base stores, and another in which we substituted off-base store-brand items when available. If an off-base store offered discount “club card” prices on any items, we used those prices in our comparisons.

We then factored in taxes — the standard 5 percent surcharge on all commissary items, and any applicable state and local taxes in the off-base stores — and, finally, calculated the percentage differences in total shopping costs for our volunteers.