Seventy-five percent of Americans who belong to a membership-based retailer said they buy paper towels there.
Name-brand: We found Bounty paper towels at all five stores.
• The cheapest picks were Costco ($28.49 for 12 rolls, or 4 cents per square foot), BJ’s ($24.49 for 12 rolls, or 4 cents per square foot), and Sam’s Club ($27.78 for 12 rolls, or 4 cents per square foot).
• King Kullen was the most expensive ($32.99 for 12 rolls, or 7 cents per square foot).
Generic: All the stores offered generic paper towels, but King Kullen was the only store where the generic price was the same as the Bounty prices at Costco, BJ’s, and Sam’s Club. The cheapest picks were Stop & Shop (the sale price for 10 rolls was $8.99), Costco ($20.49 for 12 rolls), BJ’s ($16.99 for 12 rolls), and Sam’s Club ($19.98 for 15 rolls), which all cost 2 cents per square foot.
Overall winner: Costco, BJ’s, and Sam’s Club had the cheapest name-brand paper towel prices, but if you happened to be at Stop & Shop for their generic brand sale that day, you would have scored the exact same deal.
