Yohananof Metro, Victory City, Carrefour City: How a New Sign Over the Door Raises Your Bill

By מערכת סופרקליר · 2026-07-18 · 4 min read

25% — The gap between Yohananof's cheapest and priciest branch in Superclear's index — a store in Holon versus one on Ahad Ha'am Street in Tel Aviv, the same street where "Yohananof Metro" opened (July 2026 data)

If you've shopped at Yohananof in the past few months, the sign over your branch may have changed — and you might never have noticed that the prices underneath it changed with it. Since March 2026, Yohananof has been gradually converting branches into new sub-brands: "Yohananof City" and "Yohananof Metro." Same company, almost the same logo, the same suppliers — but not the same price.

What happened at Yohananof

It started with one branch: the Beit Psagot store on Ahad Ha'am Street in Tel Aviv, converted to "Yohananof Metro" and 14% pricier overnight (TheMarker). In April 2026 the move scaled up nationally: 14 of the chain's 46 branches — about 30% of the network — were converted to the "Yohananof City" format, with overall basket prices rising by a few percent up to 10%, and far more on specific items: a European Dairies (Machlavot Europa) probiotic yogurt drink jumped 51% (from ₪3.30 to ₪5), Yoplait bio yogurt rose 36% (from ₪4.25 to ₪5.80), and Sunfrost artichokes and peas got 60% and 40% pricier respectively (Globes). The same day, Ynet published a broader comparison: a test of 1,680 shared products found a full basket costs ₪26,023.54 at regular Yohananof, ₪27,270.56 at "City" (about 5% more) and ₪30,207.37 at "Metro" (about 16% more) (Ynet). As of mid-April, the chain's new structure stood at 31 regular Yohananof branches, 13 "City" branches and one "Metro" branch (Ice). The chain's official response: "Given the network's significant expansion, we intend to continue developing a variety of store formats" (Ynet) — and per Globes, the expansion plan is ambitious: 26 more branches in the coming years, bringing the total to 72 (Globes).

Yohananof didn't invent this

Yohananof just joined a club. Back in August 2025, Ynet reported that Victory had split into five different price tiers — Victory, Victory Local, Victory City, Victory Plus and Victory Online — with gaps "of 15% and up" between formats. The same piece described Shufersal, which already runs six sub-chains (Universe, Deal Extra, Deal, Online, My Shufersal, Express), Carrefour with five formats, and Rami Levy with gaps reaching 50% on produce between a neighborhood branch and its online store. It cited concrete examples from within Victory itself: a kilo of tomatoes priced at ₪4.90 at a regular Victory branch but ₪7.90 at that same chain's "Local" and "City" branches — a roughly 61% gap on the identical product — and a Tivall corn schnitzel priced at ₪27.40 on Rami Levy's website but ₪35.90 at its neighborhood branch (Ynet).

And it kept going this year: in May 2026, Ynet revealed that Carrefour City — the chain's urban format — is in practice one of the most expensive chains in Israel (excluding convenience stores), with about a 70% gap versus Carrefour Hyper on a 93-product basket (₪1,893.37 versus ₪1,104.80). But the problem isn't just the price — it's that the state-funded "Israel Basket" discount program, which we've covered before, barely reaches Carrefour City branches: only seven discounted items are included there, versus the roughly 100-item basket at regular Carrefour stores (Ynet).

What our own data shows

This is exactly where Superclear's data can add something the news coverage alone can't: not a one-off survey, but a priciness index for every single branch, of every chain, refreshed twice a day.

Our inequality index — the gap between a chain's cheapest and priciest branch — already ranks Yohananof high: 8th out of 33 chains, with a 20-point gap between branches. The single priciest Yohananof branch in our data, nationwide, sits on Ahad Ha'am Street in Tel Aviv — the very street where "Yohananof Metro" opened — and it prices 25% above the chain's cheapest branch, in Holon-HaMerkava.

Shufersal, which runs six sub-chains, ranks 3rd out of 33 for internal inequality, with a 37-point gap. Broken down by branch name: its "Express"-branded stores price about 10% above the national median in our data, and its "Deal"-branded stores about 6% below it — a roughly 16-point gap between the two formats' averages, before even looking at the most extreme individual branches. Victory, with five price tiers, ranks only 14th for inequality (an 11-point gap) — but its cluster of Tel Aviv branches — six of them explicitly labeled "Victory City" — price about 4% above the median in our data, versus about 6% below for the rest of the chain.

For comparison: chains that haven't split themselves into multiple formats — Osher Ad, Netiv Hesed, Zol V'Begadol — show only a 3-4 point gap between their cheapest and priciest branch. For them, the chain's name still tells you something real about the price you'll pay.

The bottom line

The sub-branding trend wasn't invented to confuse you, but the effect on the ground looks a lot like it: when one chain prices itself at five or six different levels depending on the name over the door, the question "how expensive is this chain" — including our own index — becomes less and less meaningful for chains running multiple formats, and more and more dependent on which specific branch you're actually shopping at. Before deciding whether a chain is "cheap" or "expensive," it's worth checking your specific branch — not just the chain's name.

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