There is no cheap chain — only a cheap basket
We checked four products and got three different winning chains
Everyone has an opinion about which chain is cheap. The trouble is that the opinion was built from a handful of products that happened to get checked, and it is almost always only partly right.
Four products, three winners
On 13 August 2026 we checked four everyday products and found the cheapest chain for each. A 500g bag of ptitim — Yochananof (₪5.50). Turkish coffee — Good Pharm (₪12.90). Hand cream — Yochananof (₪11). Elite coffee capsules — Osher Ad (₪12.50).
Four products, three different chains winning. Not one of them won all four, and that is precisely the point.
Carrefour: mid-table on one product, dearest on another
On the bag of ptitim, Carrefour sat in the middle of the table (₪6.45) — perfectly reasonable. On the coffee capsules, from the same measurement, it was the most expensive of the chains measured: ₪21.90 against ₪12.50 at Osher Ad. Same day, same chain, two opposite answers.
This does not mean Carrefour is expensive. It means "is Carrefour cheap" is a poor question. The good question is "is Carrefour cheap on the product I am buying".
Why it works this way
Chains do not price baskets, they price items. Each one picks the categories it will fight over — the ones its customers remember — and makes it back in the categories nobody compares. Two chains can produce an identical basket total out of completely opposite item-level gaps.
So an advert claiming "cheapest in Israel" can be technically true for some basket and irrelevant to yours.
What to actually do about it
You do not need to split a shop across four stores — the time and fuel eat the saving. What does work: identify the 10 to 15 products you buy regularly, check them once, and see which chain is cheap on those. That is your chain, even if it is nobody else's "cheap chain".
And the expensive one-off items — a small appliance, a bulk pack, an imported product — are worth checking individually before each purchase. There, a single gap is large enough to justify the drive.