Bónus and Iceland’s supermarkets

Where the Bónus stores actually are

Every guide to shopping in Iceland tells you Bónus is the cheap one and shows you the pig. None of them tells you where the shops are, which turns out to be the part that changes your trip. We hold 150 grocery shops with coordinates. Here is how they divide.

Read the last column. 10 Bónus stores cover everything outside greater Reykjavík — and that number is softer than it looks. One is on Heimaey in the Westman Islands, which you reach by ferry or plane. Three are in Akureyri, within about 3 km of one another. The genuine national coverage is closer to six towns: Akranes, Borgarnes, Stykkishólmur, Ísafjörður, Selfoss and Egilsstaðir.

Meanwhile Kjörbúðin — a chain almost no visitor has heard of — has more shops outside the capital than Bónus does. That is the real shape of Icelandic grocery shopping: a discount chain concentrated where the people are, and a scattering of small general stores everywhere else.

The 346 km with no Bónus

The south coast is the route almost everyone drives. Between the Bónus at Selfoss and the Bónus at Egilsstaðir there is not one, and that covers Hvolsvöllur, Vík, Kirkjubæjarklaustur, Skaftafell, Jökulsárlón and Höfn — most of what people came for. 346 km is the straight line; the road is longer, because the road follows the coast.

You will not starve. Here is every grocery shop we hold along that stretch, west to east, with what OpenStreetMap recorded for its hours.

Check the hours before you rely on them. That column is the raw opening_hours string as OpenStreetMap recorded it, from an extract taken on 2025-12-21. Shop hours change and OSM is volunteer-maintained, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a timetable — and remember it is not a registry either, so a shop nobody has mapped will not appear here at all.

The one to plan around is Kirkjubæjarklaustur. It sits almost exactly halfway along the gap, and the hours recorded for its shop are 11:30 to 18:00 on weekdays, 10:00 to 14:00 on Saturday, and nothing at all for Sunday. If you are driving Vík to Höfn on a Sunday, assume there is nothing between them and carry lunch.

Who is who

• Bónus — the yellow sign with the pink pig. The discounter, and what Icelanders name first when you ask where to shop. Typically 10:00 to 19:00–21:00, seven days.
• Krónan — the other big supermarket, more stores with longer hours, generally a wider range. On the south coast it is the one at Hvolsvöllur and Vík.
• Nettó — often open latest, and the one that turns up in mid-sized towns such as Höfn where nothing else does.
• Kjörbúðin and Krambúð — the village shops, both Samkaup. Smaller, dearer, earlier hours, and frequently the only shop for 100 km. Between them they cover more of rural Iceland than every other chain put together.
• Hagkaup — the big-format one, mostly capital area, open very late in a couple of Reykjavík locations. Not a discounter.
• Vínbúðin — not a supermarket. The state alcohol monopoly, and the only place to buy beer or wine above 2.25% outside a bar. Separate shops, short hours, closed Sunday in most towns. Supermarkets sell no alcohol at all.

We are not going to tell you what any of it costs. Every other page on this subject quotes a saving; we hold no price data, so a number from us would be a number we made up. What we have is the map, and on a road trip the shop that is open when you arrive beats the one that was slightly cheaper 200 km ago.