Charlotte’s favorite grocery stores, ranked by our readers
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photo cred: Katie Peralta Soloff
Charlotteans have very strong opinions about grocery stores. Shopping for food is a personal experience, and plenty of factors sway where and why people choose to shop at any given supermarket.
What’s happening: We surveyed readers last month about their grocery-shopping habits. A plurality — 37.2%, or 1,198 of y’all — said Harris Teeter is your favorite grocer in the Charlotte area. This is out of a total of 3,222 total responses.
Next up: Publix, with 17.5%, or 564 votes. Coming in third was Trader Joe’s with 14.9%, or 480 votes.
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Between the lines: Co-founded by W.T. Harris and Willis Teeter in 1960, Harris Teeter was acquired by Kroger in 2014. The grocer maintains its headquarters in Matthews.
In our survey, we also asked whether there’s a grocery store that Charlotte doesn’t have that you wish we did.
The winner (by far): Wegmans, with more than 1,080 responses.
- Based in New York, Wegmans opened its first North Carolina store in Raleigh in 2019.
- “We do not have any current plans to build a store in Charlotte,” Wegmans spokesperson Laura Camera told me via email.
Zoom out: Where people prefer to shop versus where they actually shop don’t always align. Walmart — which only 1.7% of our survey respondents say is their favorite grocer — is actually the dominant grocery store in the Charlotte region in terms of sales.
- Walmart has 21.1% of the grocery-store market share in the region, according to a report from sales-tracking firm Chain Store Guide earlier this year.
- Harris Teeter is Charlotte’s No. 2 grocer by sales, with 16.5% of the market.
- No. 3 is Food Lion, with 15.4% market share. By comparison, only 4.1% of Axios Charlotte readers say Food Lion is their favorite grocer.
Of note: The grocers with the most market share also have a large number of stores in the area. Walmart has 28 stores in the Charlotte market, per Chain Store Guide; Harris Teeter has 61 stores.
- Publix, our readers’ No. 2 favorite grocer, has 23 area stores. Based in Florida, Publix has been growing its local footprint rapidly in the years since opening its first Charlotte store in 2014 in Ballantyne.
- Trader Joe’s, our readers’ third favorite grocer, only has three area stores.
The bottom line: Experts have described Charlotte as “ground-zero for grocery competition.” Census data show that approximately 120 people move here every day — and grocers fight for the dollars of all those new customers.
- We’re going to continue to see out-of-town grocers like Publix and Sprouts plant roots in Charlotte because the city is growing so rapidly.