Salad in Ocean City

5 restaurants in Ocean City list salad on their menus. The cheapest is Island Grill at $4.50, listed as Garden Salad. The typical price across town is $10.00, and the dearest we found is $11.25 at Manco & Manco, so the two ends of the list are $6.75 apart, which is 150% more for the same dish. Of the 5 kitchens listed, 1 charges more than a dollar under the typical price, 3 sit within a dollar of it and 1 charges more than a dollar over.

We track salad in 1103 other areas and compare them all on salad across United States. The typical price there runs $9.50 at the median, so Ocean City is dearer than most of them, with a lower typical price than 346 of the 1103. The lowest best price anywhere we cover is $4.00 at Kennedy Pizza & Fried Chicken in Newark, NJ, and the highest best price is $13.95 in Mount Sinai, NY. The nearest area with it is Somers Point, about 3 mi away, where the best price is $8.80.

Where is the cheapest salad in Ocean City? Island Grill, at $4.50 on 100 Atlantic Avenue. The same dish reaches $11.25 elsewhere in town, so where you order it changes the bill by $6.75.

What should salad cost here? About $10.00 is the typical price across the 5 kitchens in Ocean City that list it. Of the ones listed above, 1 is more than a dollar below that and 1 is more than a dollar above, so the typical price is a middle rather than a floor.

Is it cheaper nearby? The nearest area we track it in is Somers Point, about 3 mi away, where the best price is $8.80. That is $4.30 more than the best price here.

Why do the prices differ so much? We compare what each menu calls the same dish, and menus are not identical: portion, cut, sides and the kind of room you are sitting in all ride on the price, and none of that shows up in a number. Part portions and half sizes are kept out of this comparison, and a chain charging the same at several addresses is counted once, so the spread above is between genuinely different kitchens rather than the same one repeated.