Until recently, my flatmate and I almost exclusively shopped at the big supermarkets, mostly Coles and Woolworths because of their proximity, and occasionally Aldi.
On Sunday, sick of our surging grocery bills, we ventured out to a market near Sydney Olympic Park with a mission: to conduct our own inquiry into grocery pricing.
Millie Muroi and her flatmate Talica Gummery, holding a tray of more eggs than they know what to do with.
We may not have the probing powers of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), which is set to report its findings on supermarket pricing by February next year, but we had the urgency.
While inflation has slowed in recent months, food and non-alcoholic beverage prices still rose 4.5 per cent in the year to December, and wage growth is only just starting to catch up at 4.2 per cent.
Supermarket giants would like you to believe their prices are down, down, and staying down because they’re competing with each other to attract customers. But the reality is that competition is pretty limited.
That’s because the Australian supermarket scene is dominated by two main characters: Coles and Woolworths, which have a combined market share of about 65 per cent. It’s illegal for them to reach agreements on how much they’ll each charge, but Coles and Woolworths undoubtedly know the win-win situation is for neither of them to go too hard on the discounting. They even reportedly buy up land to keep rivals off their turf.
Supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles face a range of inquiries into their pricing structure.Credit: Kirsten Burghard
That would be much harder for them to pull off if there were more heavyweight competitors in the supermarket space, like there are in the UK and the US, where no single supermarket chain has more than 30 per cent of the market.
Making the two-hour return trip on public transport to Paddy’s Markets in Sydney’s west, it was clear why for many people, especially those without the privilege of a car, a weekly trip to buy cheaper groceries just isn’t realistic.
I couldn’t wait for the supermarket price gouging inquiry, so I conducted my own
15
20
05.03.2024
Until recently, my flatmate and I almost exclusively shopped at the big supermarkets, mostly Coles and Woolworths because of their proximity, and occasionally Aldi.
On Sunday, sick of our surging grocery bills, we ventured out to a market near Sydney Olympic Park with a mission: to conduct our own inquiry into grocery pricing.
Millie Muroi and her flatmate Talica Gummery, holding a tray of more eggs than they know what to do with.
We may not have the probing powers of the Australian Competition and Consumer........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Nikkei Editorial
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
