Which Supermarket Is Cheapest To Shop At?

When it comes to the weekly shop, Australians are always looking for a bargain. And the shops know it.

The major players, Woolworths and Coles, seem to have a never-ending mantra of cheaper deals jingling around in our ears. Now they’re on to ‘down down, prices are down’ and ‘cheap, cheap’, but are they really living up to their promises?

Well, CHOICE has the answer. They recently surveyed the four big players when it comes to groceries in Australia: Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and IGA. They had done the same in 2009 after shoppers (who on average spend more than $200 of their weekly income on shopping) encouraged the survey. What they found in 2009 and what they’ve found today are a little different, but the same shop won in both cases.

Who Is The Cheapest?

It turns out that now and in the past, German discount chain Aldi offers the cheapest groceries to Australian shoppers. CHOICE found that a basket of leading brand products (i.e. not the shop’s own brand items) costs $174.97 at Coles, $176.77 at Woolworths. However, at Aldi, a basket of equivalent products costs only $87.68. So, that’s about a 50% saving just by shopping at Aldi. Of course, it might not be quite fair to compare leading brands at Coles and Woolworths with the equivalent brands at Aldi, but it offers a good place to start.

What’s interesting to note is how different the prices were between Coles and Woolworths. Only $1.80 between them different, and that was excluding the special offers. Certainly, it shows quite clearly how closely the two chains watch each other’s prices.

Unfortunately, if you’re looking for savings, IGA isn’t the place to go. Their basket of leading brand products came in about 8% more expensive than the Coles basket.

Private Label v. Leading Brand

As well as looking at leading brands versus Aldi equivalent, CHOICE also looked at private label brands (i.e. made by the supermarket). These account for a massive 21% of packaged grocery sales in Australia, up from 13.5% in 2008. In fact, many people believe the quality of most private labels is equal to that of name brands. This was clearly proven at the Product of the Year Awards in February when around one-quarter of all the consumer-voted choices were private labels from big supermarkets.

So, if you look at the private labels from the three main shopping centres, you’ll see less difference between them. Aldi still came out on top here, being 23% cheaper than Coles and 27% cheaper than Woolworths for the equivalent products. But this means if you’re looking to save money, the same basket of private label products will save you $60.73 compared to leading brands at Coles, and $57.37 at Woolworths.

However, there’s more than price to think about when it comes to private labels. The truth is that as large supermarkets and their own private brands begin to take over the market, the brand names we know and love won’t be able to afford to stay on the shelves. So, of course, it is important to think about price, but if all that’s available is the private label of the supermarket, with no competition, the prices may not stay low forever.

Will prices matter depending on your location? See next page