The Eight Cents That Explain the Duopoly

Someone on r/AussieFrugal did something I wish more people would do before they open their mouths about grocery prices: they actually priced three dinners, ingredient by ingredient, at both Coles and Woolworths, and showed their working. Butter chicken, beef lasagna, chana masala. Full spreadsheet, per-serve cost, the lot. It’s the kind of post that makes you sit up a bit, because it’s rare to see someone separate “what the recipe costs” from “what the trolley costs,” which is normally where these online cost comparisons fall apart.

The headline number stopped me. Butter chicken came out to $19.68 at Woolworths and $19.61 at Coles. Eight cents apart. Chana masala, same story, eight cents. Only the lasagna showed a real gap, about two dollars, almost entirely down to cheese and mince pricing. Two supermarkets, same three meals, within a rounding error of each other on two out of three. One commenter said it outright: fuck the duopoly. Another, more mildly, wondered if that’s proof of price coordination or just proof that two companies watching each other’s catalogues will always converge.

I don’t know which it is, and I think that’s the honest answer. Coles and Woolworths aren’t legally allowed to ring each other up and agree on a lasagna price, and I’ve got no evidence they do. But you don’t need a phone call to get this outcome. If both chains are running the same catalogue software, watching the same competitor pricing feeds, and stocking near-identical home brand ranges, you get convergence without conspiracy. The result looks the same either way from the checkout: not much of a choice. That’s the uncomfortable bit. We keep asking “are they colluding” as if a clean yes or no would fix something, when the actual problem might just be that there are only two of them and that’s plenty enough to squeeze the middle without anyone breaking a law.

What I liked more than the duopoly gotcha, though, was the spice math. Ground cumin at Coles works out to $6.31 per hundred grams. A bigger tub from an Indian grocer brings that down to about a fifth of the price. The person doing the pricing pointed out that a jar of dried oregano is dearer per gram than the beef in the same lasagna. That tracks with my own kitchen. I started buying spices from an Indian grocer in Springvale a few years back after doing the same double-take at a Coles turmeric jar, and it’s not close. Same goes for the Vietnamese grocer near my office for anything involving fish sauce, rice noodles, or coriander in actual bunches rather than a $2.20 plastic clamshell of sixty grams. The big two are fine for a fast weeknight shop. They are not the place to buy anything that sits in a spice rack.

None of this is really about butter chicken. It’s about the fact that “cost of living” has become a phrase people wave around instead of a set of actual numbers, and actual numbers are more useful and less comfortable. One comment nailed it: everyone treats every money problem as “CoL” and it becomes a mantra rather than a diagnosis. I get the instinct, prices genuinely have gone up and wages genuinely haven’t kept pace for a lot of people, that’s real and I’m not walking it back. But there’s a difference between “the system is squeezing us” as a political claim, which I think is largely true, and “therefore every specific grocery decision I make is out of my hands,” which isn’t. The chana masala in that post costs $1.90 a serve. That’s not the supermarkets being generous, it’s a vegetarian dish built on pantry staples bought in bulk, and it’s genuinely cheap.

I’m not going to pretend I always cook the cheap option. Some weeks it’s a Uber Eats Thai on a Wednesday because everyone’s tired and nobody can be bothered, and I don’t feel the need to apologise for that. But the reminder that a decent curry for four people can land under five dollars a head, cooked properly, with real spices, is the kind of thing worth keeping in the back pocket. Not as a mantra. Just as a number.