Diaper Per Dollar, Over 200 Diapers Compared From Walmart, Amazon, Costco, Target and more

January 31, 2021 by Michael Kirk - Efficiency Is Everything

Target shoppers, never again believe the marketing ‘Target has the best diaper prices’.

Costco shoppers, never again believe their marketing ‘Costco has the lowest cost Bulk prices’.

This study will help you understand the lowest cost brands, sizes, stores, and qualities of a diaper. In addition, we’ll share our hybrid system for using cloth and disposable diapers.

Comparing- Store, Brand, Cost, and Quality

Even if you refuse to shop at Walmart who dominates the top of this list, you can still have some takeaways regarding brands, and size from this table below-

Best

You can see the most expensive brands, sizes, and qualities(nighttime and special allergic diapers) performed worse-

Worse

Generally stay away from Huggies and Pampers.

Parents Choice Quality

Parents Choice won best diaper per dollar, so we evaluated it for quality. One of the sides came undone on about 3 diapers in a row, but this could be our kid messing with the diaper. We had no issues in 3 months since.

We also tried their nighttime diapers and ~30% of the nights our 20 month old kid peed through the diaper. It’s hard to know if this is a quality issue, or my kid drank too much before bed.

Given those issues, these are not enough to deter us. We continue to use Parents Choice.

Other General Tips

If your kid fits in a size 4, do not waste money on a size 5. (Exception not shown in the data, seems that Newborn diapers cost more than size 1)

There may be differences between Pampers types(swaddlers vs cruisers), but when other brands are half the cost, you can easily change a diaper 2x as often and forget about that quality difference.

Lowest Cost Environmentally Friendly- Cloth Diapers

You may have considered saving big bucks and trying cloth diapers but were afraid of scraping poo on a daily basis. The solution is a hybrid system. The cost savings is incredible as we cut down disposable diaper usage by at least 1/2 if not 3/4. Most of our cloth diapers we got free or low cost from friends.

Here are our rules

>Nighttime Diapers for bed

>If there is small poo, put on a cloth diaper for the next 2-4 hours.

>If there is big poo, put on cloth diapers for the next 6-12 hours.

>If there is a hard poo and kid didn’t poo yesterday, put on a disposable diaper. More is on the way.

This generally works, with an occasional(1-4 times per month) missed poo that requires being rinsed off. As an added benefit, you learn how diapers work, and that disposable diapers can hold significantly more urine than you expect.

The Rest of the Data

The Diapers Per Dollar can be found here, have fun playing with the filters. Not every size of every brand was in stock at the time of recording. The excel file also contains notes. Some quick outputs below