A friend of mine and I were talking over lunch 2 weeks ago and he brought up pricing at 2 different locations of the same chain grocery in the same county. He thought it was insignificant at the time, but it occurred to him later what the difference was. He noticed that the prices of groceries and household goods on one end of the county was higher than on the other side within the same chain.
I didn't understand why he thought it made sense until after I thought about it a while. One reason I thought of was that there was more crime in the area (which is statistically verifiable) and at potentially security and/or shoplifting (which is higher according to employees and management) at that location elevated costs. He said he thought of that, but some big box stores/chains shared that cost across a region rather than parsed to individual locations locally.
His thought was that there was less competition, which allowed them higher pricing without a loss of sales, but also that statistically there were a lot more shoppers on govt assistance, and many of those recipients aren't as price conscious because the money isn't theirs. We could both be wrong, but the reasoning isn't flawed.
I plan to go there to check out the pricing for myself at some point. A simpler reason could also be understaffing and they simply hadn't changed the pricing as quickly at one location.