What a store run really costs (it's not the gas)

Nobody prices the trip.

You'll comparison-shop a $9 pack of trash bags between two stores, then drive twenty-two minutes to save eighty cents. We did it for years. The store's price tag covers exactly one thing — the item — and leaves the two biggest costs of buying it off the receipt entirely.

The two lines the store never prints

The drive. Right now our default math uses a suburban round trip and current-ish gas prices: about $14.45 — $1.45 in gas (11 mi round trip at 26 mpg, $3.42/gal) and $13.00 in time (52 minutes at $15/hr).

Your time. That's the number that stings. The gas is real but small; the fifty-some minutes of driving, parking, wandering the aisle because they moved the detergent again, standing behind someone doing a return, and driving home — that's the actual bill.

That's not our opinion of what you should value your time at. It's a deliberately conservative $15 an hour — below the median US wage. If you earn more, your store runs cost more.

"But I like getting out of the house"

Fair. This isn't an argument against ever entering a store. It's an argument against re-buying the boring stuff in person. Trash bags don't need to be squeezed for ripeness. The 42-count omeprazole doesn't have a produce section. Every staple you move from cart-in-the-parking-lot to cart-on-the-website deletes a fraction of a trip from your year.

The store trip you keep should be the one you actually want to take — not the one the empty wipes box forced on you at 8pm on a Tuesday.

What we don't count (which helps the store)

Our trip math leaves out three real costs, all of which would make the store side look worse:

• The impulse tax. Checkout-lane research puts unplanned spend at several dollars per trip. The store's whole floor plan is engineered for it.
• Return trips. An Amazon return is a QR code. A store return is a second round trip — the whole receipt again.
• The kid multiplier. If you're shopping solo with small children, you already know the trip costs more than any spreadsheet says.

We'd rather under-claim and be believed. The receipts on this site charge gas and time only — and Amazon still wins most of the staples we track.

Run your own numbers

Every assumption above is a slider on our trip cost calculator — your MPG (there's a minivan preset, because of course there is), your miles, your gas price, what your hour is worth. Set it once and every receipt on this site recalculates with your math, not ours.