Last Tuesday, a woman on Reddit described a moment a lot of us have had. She was standing in the grocery aisle at Walmart, staring at a package of ground beef that now cost $8 a pound — roughly double what she’d been paying. The shampoo she’d bought for $6 was suddenly over $10. A basic sweatshirt? Twenty-five bucks. She wasn’t shopping at Whole Foods. She was at Walmart, the store that built its entire identity on being the cheapest option in town. And she wanted to know: what happened?
Great Value isn’t always what it claims to be
Walmart’s house brand, Great Value, has always been the quiet promise behind the store’s appeal. You walk in figuring you’ll save a couple bucks on cereal, canned goods, bread, eggs — the basics. And for years, that was mostly true. But side-by-side price comparisons have started telling a different story. Aldi, which also relies heavily on its own store brands, has regularly been found to price its house brands lower than Great Value. Costco’s Kirkland Signature line has been competitive too.
What really stings, though, is how much Great Value prices have climbed since the pandemic. Social media is full of shoppers documenting the increases — some claiming prices have flat-out doubled on certain items. Walmart CEO John Furner blamed inflation. Fair enough. But critics like UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich and Senator Elizabeth Warren have pushed back hard, arguing that companies like Walmart have been using inflation as cover for something simpler: profit. Reich pointed out on X that Walmart’s net income spiked 93% to $10.5 billion toward the end of 2023. That’s not a company struggling to keep the lights on.
So the “value” in Great Value? It depends on when you’re shopping — and who you’re comparing it to.
Tariffs are making everything worse — and Walmart admits it
That Reddit post didn’t just spark a pricing debate. It turned into a full-blown political argument. Hundreds of commenters blamed tariffs imposed by the Trump administration for the rising costs. “Remember when everyone said ‘Tariffs are a tax you’ll pay on the products you buy’… well, here you go,” one person wrote. And they weren’t wrong — at least not entirely.
In a Q2 earnings call, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon confirmed the pressure was real. “We’ve continued to see our costs increase each week, which we expect will continue into the third and fourth quarters,” he said. The company tried to absorb some of the hit, but admitted it had raised prices on certain items. And here’s the thing about tariffs that gets lost in the noise: even products made in America are tangled up in global supply chains. One Redditor who works in manufacturing put it bluntly — the machines in their U.S. factory are made in China, and replacement parts now cost significantly more.
Labor shortages, shipping costs, visa revocations affecting agricultural workers — it all adds up. Some people insisted Walmart was simply seizing the moment to squeeze margins. Others said it’s still cheaper than Kroger. Both things can be true at the same time, which is kind of the problem.
In 43 metro areas, Walmart dominates the grocery market
Here’s where things get uncomfortable. According to a 2019 analysis by Visual Capitalist, Walmart controlled more than 50% of the grocery market in at least 43 major metropolitan areas across the U.S. In Bismarck, North Dakota — population 135,000 — Walmart held 83% of the market. In five areas, the number was 90% or higher. Atchison, Kansas? Ninety-five percent.
Under U.S. antitrust law, things are supposed to get scrutiny when a company controls more than half of a market. And yet Walmart has blown past that threshold dozens of times over. FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya has been investigating what happens when that level of dominance goes unchecked. “What you’re left with is some of the poorest people in the country, some of the people in the most underserved areas, are left without a place to buy fresh groceries, or just groceries, period,” he told Time.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance didn’t mince words either: “No other corporation in history has ever amassed this degree of control over the U.S. food system.” When a single retailer has that much power, the usual rules of competition stop applying. Farmers get squeezed — receiving an average of just $0.15 for every dollar consumers spend on groceries. Suppliers are forced into unfavorable deals. And customers in places where Walmart is the only game in town? They pay whatever Walmart decides to charge.
A $45 million lawsuit over weighted items
On the flip side of the big-picture market dominance stuff, there are the smaller everyday annoyances — the kind that add up quietly. Like getting overcharged on your deli meat. In 2024, Walmart settled a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of mislabeling the weight of grocery items like produce and meat, resulting in customers being systematically overcharged. The settlement? $45 million.
Walmart’s official line, given to NPR, was predictable: “We still deny the allegations, however we believe a settlement is in the best interest of both parties.” A website was set up for affected customers — anyone who’d bought weighted grocery items between October 2018 and January 2024 could file a claim, with individual payouts capped at $500. It’s the kind of thing you’d never notice on a single receipt. An extra few ounces here, a rounding error there. But multiplied across millions of transactions? That’s real money. And it raises a question: if a company is big enough to settle a lawsuit for $45 million and barely flinch, what does accountability even look like?
The egg situation is a mess
You’d think eggs would be simple. They are not. Back in 2016, Walmart announced a big commitment: by 2025, it would source only cage-free eggs. Given that the company sells more than 11 billion eggs annually, that was a bold promise. And by 2024? Only about 27% of Walmart eggs were actually certified cage-free. So much for that timeline.
But the problems go beyond broken pledges. In 2018, a customer sued Walmart alleging that eggs labeled as organic were coming from hens confined indoors — what the ASPCA called “faux-ganic.” PETA separately investigated one of Walmart’s major suppliers, Trillium, and the undercover footage was ugly. Workers were allegedly throwing live birds into the garbage, denying sick hens medical treatment, and cramming 2.4 million chickens into crowded metal cages. Then in 2022, an avian flu outbreak at Trillium killed an estimated 2.6 million birds.
None of this shows up on the carton. You just see the price, maybe a reassuring label about “farm fresh” or “all natural,” and move on. Which is exactly the point.
They literally invented a fake craft brewery
This one is almost funny. Almost. In 2017, Walmart customers started asking questions about a craft beer brand called Trouble Brewing, which was advertised as being from Rochester, New York. Sounds legit. Small batch, local roots, all that. Except The Washington Post looked into it and found that the brewery simply didn’t exist.
What did exist was Genesee Brewing — the company behind Genny and Genny Cream Ale, which are, let’s say, not what most people imagine when they hear “craft beer.” Walmart’s senior buyer said they weren’t trying to deceive anyone and that plenty of products don’t identify the manufacturer on the label. Technically true. But slapping “Trouble Brewing” on a package designed to look like it came from some hip microbrewery in Upstate New York is a choice. It tells you something about how carefully the marketing is calibrated — not just for groceries, but for beer, for brand identity, for the illusion of choice.
Massive food waste, and a troubling response
While the pricing concerns grab headlines, there’s a quieter issue that doesn’t get as much attention. A 2016 CBC investigation found that Walmart stores were tossing food that hadn’t even reached its expiration date and was still cold. A former produce and bakery manager named Ali-Zain Mevawala told reporters he threw out roughly a shopping cart’s worth of food every single day. Imperfect fruits and vegetables — perfectly fine to eat — went straight into the garbage.
He once asked his manager why they couldn’t just give the food away. The response he got was chilling in its honesty: “If you just give it away to people, then why are they going to buy it from us?” By 2022, Walmart was reportedly responsible for around 383 kilotons of food waste per year. Walmart has said it donates to food banks and that discarded food was found to be unsafe. But employees on the ground tell a different story, and videos continue to circulate on social media showing just how much perfectly good food ends up in dumpsters.
In a country where food insecurity affects millions of families, that’s a hard thing to justify — especially from a company posting record profits.
So where does this leave the average Walmart shopper? Probably standing in the same aisle as that Redditor, doing quick math in their head and wondering when $8-a-pound ground beef became the new normal. It’s tempting to pick one villain — tariffs, corporate greed, supply chains, market monopoly — but the truth is, they’re all pulling on different threads of the same problem. What might be worth paying attention to, though, is what Walmart announced in 2024: AI technology that predicts when you’ll run out of groceries and reorders them for you automatically. Whether that sounds helpful or dystopian probably depends on how you feel about a company this powerful knowing what’s in your fridge.
