Safeway is one of the bigger chains here; spent many years in college and in the East Bay giving them my patronage because they were kind of the default option/only business around most of the time. I try to avoid going there for regular groceries however, because I drink a lot of milk and their Lucerne brand tastes awful like someone added peanuts to it.
S-Mart/
Smart Foods is the Central Valley grocery chain I grew up going to, and the one I still give a majority of my business to. They're like a slightly more working-class version of Safeway and I've always felt at home in their aisles versus Safeway's modern tendency to go full-gentrification. I'm very peeved with their corporate office however, the one around the block from my childhood home closed down the store in order to remodel into a Food4Less style budget-warehouse-store in the last year, despite the store doing the best sales numbers its ever done. The suits running this chain aren't the smartest people. They easily could have become what Safeway is in Northern California, but they just haven't been able to keep up.
Raley's is like an upper middle class Safeways. It is like a quarter step between Safeway's and Whole Foods. I go there from time to time when I need something specific or are driving past there on the way home. But you will generally get significantly more expensive food there, for very marginal increases in quality and I find it generally not worth it to do regular shopping there. But it's still within my upper boundaries of what's affordable.
Food4Less is, the before stated, budget-warehouse-style grocery chain here. I generally despise them for the reasons VV had experiences with them. They're definitely cheap, and if you're shopping like you live at the poverty line it can help your budget a lot. But you really end up getting what you pay for. I would go there for certain bulk items when I didn't have access to a Costco, but I'd rather find ways to trim my budget in other ways if I had to.
Winco is like mildly cleaner, more corporatized version of Food4Less, focusing even more on bulk purchases. I probably would have given them a lot of business if one existed anywhere near where I live, but a 40 min roundtrip for groceries is untenable.
Trader Joes is a fun place to go to for very specific things, and I had a lot of roommates in the past whose devotion to them was cultish, so I ended up shopping there a lot when tagging along for car rides. But I find a lot of their organic brand non-perishables to be vile, and a lot of their perishable organic brand foods half a pathetic shelf life, so I mostly stick to their frozen foods, or small amounts of produce/meat I intend to use immediately. Their self-branded beers used to be some of the best value propositions you could get in booze, but they changed their supplier a while back and now I'd rather drink leftover well drinks mixed together after hours at a bar. I would go to them more often, but there isn't one anywhere near where I currently live. Also, there's something about the clientele of TJ's that's just insufferable. By far the worst mask/social distancing adherence of any place I shopped for groceries during the pandemic.
Costco is a place I adore and it's also extremely dangerous place to go shopping at if you're either hungry, or have low impulse control. What am I gonna do with 5 lbs of cheese? I'm not sure. And how exactly did I end up with $400 of groceries when all I wanted was to pick up a rotisserie chicken?
Whole Foods is a dystopian nightmare. I haven't even been inside one since Amazon brought them, but everything I hear sounds even more wretched than before.
Sprouts is like the suburban soccer mom version of Whole Foods and I don't find it nearly as offensive, but it's still just as completely useless. The best version of these yuppie, over-priced, lifestyle grocery stores in my experience is
Andronicos, but the one I lived next to in Berkeley closed down because apparently whoever crunches the numbers over there was really dumb.
Monterey Market in Berkeley, CA was my all-time favorite place to shop. A quaint yet expansive produce market, run by a long established Japanese-American family. They always had fantastic prices on the widest variety of locally grown produce you can imagine. Lots of really neat, obscure stuff. It was something of an institution in Berkeley. I probably wouldn't have gone to it much if I hadn't lived just a few blocks away, because finding parking there was a nightmare on account of how popular it was and how little parking they had available in that mostly residential neighborhood. When I'm in town, I drop by sometimes. They've had a lot of growing pains over the last decade with regards to trying to keep their business model profitable, and also dealing with the owners retiring and handing the business off to their kids. I hope they stick around and serve the community for years to come though. They were my go-to for produce for a long while.
Speaking of Monterey Market, I could do a whole lengthy effort post on the Japanese/Asian markets I go/have gone to. But those are very occasional these days on account of not living near any of them anymore.
). More recently a Wegman's opened up semi-nearby and had interesting stuff in its fliers so we started doing curbside from there as well. They've had good stuff so I think my partner may keep doing some in person shopping there. But we'll probably get back to the local co-op some too. Getting back to the actual farmer's market would be nice, but we don't have a good track record of managing to leave the house before noon on weekends. 
