Publix Beat Walmart by 9 Points in the Survey Floridians Actually Care About

Walmart won 12 grocery categories in the 2026 Newsweek trust awards.

But Publix outscored the retail giant by nine points in the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s 2026 grocery report.

The ACSI scores are national, and Publix comes out ahead of Walmart in them.

In a poll of shoppers across the country, this is where Publix beat Walmart, and where it didn’t.

Where the Scores Come From

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a research group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose model was developed at the University of Michigan’s business school.

Every year, it emails a random sample of shoppers and asks how satisfied they feel with the store they use.

For the retail study that includes the 2026 supermarket scores, the ACSI collected 31,293 surveys between January and December of 2025.

Each chain gets a score from 0 to 100.

The higher, the better.

The ACSI published the supermarket scores on January 27, 2026, as the 2026 report built on 2025 data.

The report’s findings on Publix and Walmart come first, then the full scoreboard, counted from the top score down.

Nine-Point Gap

Publix scored 84 in the 2026 ACSI supermarket report, and Walmart scored 75.

Neither number moved from the year before.

Nine points sounds small on a 100-point scale until you see how tightly the grocery business is packed.

The 19 chains in the report span only 13 points, from 73 at the bottom to 86 at the top.

Publix and Walmart sit near opposite ends of that spread.

Only three chains fall outside the band between them.

The gap between them is bigger than the eight points separating first-place Trader Joe’s from the industry average of 78.

Put another way, Publix shoppers grade their trips close to the way Trader Joe’s shoppers do, while Walmart shoppers grade theirs close to the way Albertsons and Giant Eagle customers do.

Checkout speed and call center service tied for the lowest-rated part of the grocery experience, at 79 across the whole industry. Walmart’s chain score is a different measure, and at 75 it sits lower still.

What the Index Measures

The ACSI asks shoppers about 18 parts of a grocery trip, and it publishes an industry-wide score for each.

Store hours, the ease of picking up an online order, and the reliability of the store’s app tied for the highest mark at 85.

The quality of the meat and produce scored 83, along with store cleanliness, variety, and how accurately the store fills an order.

Staff courtesy came in at 81.

Then the marks drop.

How often a store runs sales scored 80, the pharmacy scored 80, and the call center and checkout speed shared the bottom at 79.

So the two lowest marks nationwide are for waiting in line and waiting on hold.

The ACSI doesn’t publish those 18 marks chain by chain, so the report never says whether Publix beat Walmart on produce or on the register line.

Full Scoreboard

Publix and Walmart are two of the 19 grocery chains the ACSI names in its 2026 report, which also carries one combined score for all smaller chains.

Trader Joe's took first at 86, up two points, a year after the two chains shared first place at 84.

Publix stayed at 84 and slipped to second.

H-E-B, which operates in Texas and Mexico, took third at 83.

Fourth place is the line a Walmart shopper would repeat: Sam's Club scored 82, seven points above the Walmart stores run by the same company.

Aldi, Costco, Whole Foods, ShopRite, and Target filled out the top nine, all between 79 and 81.

Five more chains sat on the industry average of 78.

Kroger is one of those five. It has never run a grocery store in Florida, and it has no stores there now after shutting down its Florida delivery service on February 1.

Wegmans is another.

The chain fell to 78 from 83, the biggest drop of any grocer in the report, after finishing one point behind Publix the year before.

Save A Lot moved the other way, up three points to 78, the biggest gain on the list.

Walmart finished 17th of 19 at 75, ahead of only Albertsons at 74 and Giant Eagle at 73.

Trust Vote vs. Satisfaction Score

Walmart's 12 trust awards come from a different survey with a different question.

Newsweek and BrandSpark asked 35,215 shoppers in that study which brands they trust most, category by category, including grocery.

Walmart's 12 grocery wins include the national title for grocery customer service, which it also held in 2025.

Publix lost a different one. It had shared the South title for conventional supermarkets with Kroger, and Walmart took it outright this year.

A trust vote rewards the chain the largest number of people picked, and Walmart has far more customers to pick it.

The ACSI works the other way around.

It never asks a Publix shopper about Walmart, so a chain's size can't help its score.

Each chain's customers grade the trip they made, and that's the grade Publix wins by nine.

Both results are true.

Florida Store Counts

Publix runs the whole company from Lakeland, on I-4 between Tampa and Orlando.

The chain has been a Florida company since George Jenkins opened the first store in Winter Haven in 1930.

Publix has 897 stores in Florida, according to the company's facts page, more than the 1,442-store chain has in its seven other states put together.

That's 62% of the chain.

Walmart's Florida count is smaller.