The RPI Winners and Trends
Who's Better Positioned and Why
The Retailer Preference Index Approach – What drives sustainable success in the US?
The results of our model tell us that 2025 expands on two trends already identified in 2024 and introduces a new one. The importance of competitive positioning between retailers on savings – indicated by the pillar Price, Promo and Rewards – continues a trend up that began in 2022. At the same time, the importance of competitive positioning between retailers on online shopping and tech that enhances the overall shopping experience, indicated by the pillar Digital, continues a trend down that began last year. This means that retailers who have an advantage in savings tend to be driving better multi-dimensional outcomes – like reach, spend per customer, sales growth, and emotional connection with shoppers. Meanwhile, retailers with Digital advantages are seeing this advantage matter less than in previous years.
This decline in the importance of Digital is offset by increases in the importance of Speed, Convenience, a largely brick-and-mortar construct. This means that retailers whose brick-and-mortar experience delivers time savings tend to produce stronger results, more so than in prior years. This is a trend that also began last year.
The new development that we’ll focus much of this report on is the simultaneous strengthening of the importance of savings and assortment Quality. This is the first year we’ve been conducting this report where we’ve noticed an equally strong trend up in the importance of both. Together, these two pillars – Price, Promo, Rewards, and Quality – account for 71% of the difference in financial outcomes and customer loyalty between retailers in the U.S. That is why we call them the Value Core. The rest of the pillars are Value Amplifiers: they are important to success, but only if the Value Core is healthy.
We’ll focus much of this report on a discussion of the Value Core.
Long-term success is all about delivering on consumers' basic needs—shoppers are now, more than ever, trying to maximize value on their purchases. In the following sections, we'll explore the wide range of retail strategies across the Quality and Savings spectrum. Some retailers find growth by being Quality-First, while others center on Savings to drive growth. There are trade-offs in results retailers can achieve, when they focus on one strategy versus the other, and we’ll look closer at these trade-offs in later sections. While there are different ways to position your brand for future growth, they all come back to the Value Core.
Which retailers have the best RPI scores and are best positioned for long-term success?
1st Quartile retailers are a mix of best-in-class regional banners and non-conventional national banners. H-E-B, Market Basket, Woodman's and WinCo Foods are examples of best-in-class regional supermarkets that have built customer value propositions designed to weather the growth of club, discounter, limited-SKU, and pureplay formats, as well as the ups and downs of shocks to consumer context.
Costco, Aldi, Amazon, Trader Joe's, Walmart and Sam's Club continue to represent the vanguard of these growth formats from the past decade. The strength of their value propositions promises continued growth into the future.
Woodman's is a newcomer to the RPI and already arrives in the 1st Quartile through strong results in Quality and Price, Promo, Rewards, as well as a 2nd place finish in Operations. For some detail on Woodman’s, you can visit the “Customer Feedback Letters” section of this report or view this brief write-up on the author of the RPI’s LinkedIn page.
Meanwhile, Food 4 Less/Foods Co jumps 9 spots to 16th place overall in 2025, marking the brand's first appearance in the 1st Quartile, thanks to the increasing importance of savings in driving results.
We also saw notable rank changes in 2025. Amazon drops 2 spots while Sam's Club drops 6 places. This change is only somewhat explained by their individual performances, but rather by the decreased importance of the Digital pillar in 2025, which is a market-leading strength for both Amazon and Sam’s. Additionally, neither are in the 1st Quartile overall for the value core pillars of Price, Promo, Rewards, or Quality. Given that they are jostling for RPI positioning with other top retailers who do have clear strengths in these areas, the increase in the importance of the Value Core will soften Sam’s Club and Amazon’s competitive positions relative to other 1st Quartile retailers. To be clear, both retailers are still in the 1st Quartile overall and still in a better position than virtually any other regional supermarket to pick up share and drive other outcomes.
Rank Gainers and Decliners in 2025
The rank gainers and decliners this year yield a critical lesson: the biggest thing gainers had in common was their ability to deliver against the Value Core (Price, Promo, Rewards, and Quality) more efficiently. This group of retailers is mostly made up of price-oriented brands, and their perception on Price, Promo, and Rewards is significantly better than the rest of the market.
Perhaps more importantly, the market shift to even more importance on the first Pillar (Price, Promo, Rewards) put those brands in a stronger position than they were a year ago.
Sprouts, the lone Quality-First brand of the gainer group, stands out by breaking into the top 4 brands in Quality nationally. This helped strengthen its Value Core overall.
Following suit, the rank decliners are composed of mid-market conventional supermarket brands, which are most likely finding themselves with weaker customer value propositions now that the U.S. consumer has shifted its attention even more to the Value Core. Balanced strategies that try to accommodate all pillars tend to be less rewarded than brands that prioritize share differences in Price, Promo, Rewards or Quality or trade-off on some experience elements (like Speed/Convenience or Digital) to be able to invest in driving both.