One thing I have noted during this inflationary period is that individual stores/chains are gaming pricing much more than I remember before.

For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago.

Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.

You are right and we did shop around for a while to optimize for the best value for the price we were paying. We ended up on a store (Aldi, in this case) which overall had the cheapest basic groceries.

The problem with shopping at 5 stores to save money on groceries is that with gas prices you're probably not saving money, and if you're not moving around to various stores using any type of energy but kinetic, it is a large opportunity cost that could be spent doing other things, if you even have the time at all.

There is no way I could go shop at 5, or even 3 stores a week for food, I simply do not have the time. (Spouse and I both work full-time, 3 kids at 3 different ages going to 3 different schools every day, etc)