I don't know what to think about the supermarket price war thing. A while ago I read a Choice article that said for products containing only one ingredient, for example, tinned tomatoes, there is very little difference between the quality of the various brands, so you might as well buy the cheapest. I often bought the Coles/Woolworths/IGA home brand of things like tinned vegetables, butter, basic bread (for toasting) and eggs.
I never bought the homebrand milk because as someone who doesn't like the taste of milk on its own and therefore worries about getting enough calcium I've always thought it worth paying the extra for the high calcium Brownes one. Now that Coles is doing the $1/L milk thing, and has extended it to eggs and today chicken as well, I confess to feel suspicious about the apparent generosity of their intentions. I find myself reaching for the Coles brand of tomatoes, eggs, butter etc, and then wondering whether I'm getting sucked in by buying it. Wondering whether I'm exchanging a short term saving for a destruction of competition and therefore a long term cost increase. How much resilience do the smaller companies have? If I do buy the Coles branded stuff, and if everyone else does too, will there will be any options in a year or two? And then I wonder whether that is madness and I should stop amping up our shopping bill by buying branded products, and have faith in a capitalist market to take care of itself.
Do you buy the home brand products?
3 comments:
I buy Aldi for many of those staples, which is probably why Coles is slashing prices!
I wish we had Aldi here!
I worry more about HOW they can make things so cheap. If you can buy a packet of ham for less than 59c (Aldi price here) and then you think about the fact that includes 19% VAT, packaging, transport, labour etc, I hate to think what the actual piece of pig was worth in the first place! In Germany the cheap supermarkets (or "discounters" as they call them) such as Aldi and Lidl are constantly having price wars which means that some things get stupidly cheap. They save on things like staffing costs - their workers get paid a pittance (no minimum wage here) or they take people on for a one month, unpaid "trial" and then don't employ them, they just replace them with more free probationers afterwards! In the regular supermarkets I buy the home brand stuff for things like toilet paper and alfoil but will pay more for milk and eggs etc to know they are at least from the region or organic. I think it's a bit different here though, in Australia I wouldn't think twice about where my veggies come from because they're usually quite local anyway, here you read the fine print and you discover your fruit has been imported from Peru and it makes you think more about the logistics involved and the cost, and yet they still get the price down somehow....
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