The Steak Is Thinner and So Is Everyone's Patience

Choice put out a report yesterday saying grocery prices are up 7% across Coles, Woolworths, IGA and Aldi. Not over a year. Over three months. I read that on the train and then spent the rest of the trip doing the maths on my own shop, which is a genuinely depressing way to pass twenty minutes.

The comments under the story on r/AusFinance did what these threads always do: split into two camps that talk past each other. One side says it’s simple, supermarkets are gouging, record profits, duopoly, end of story. The other side lays out a longer list, wage growth in retail outpacing inflation, immigration pushing up rents, councils blocking commercial development, gas export policy dragging up electricity costs. Someone even laid it out as dot points, tidy and confident, the kind of comment that reads like it’s settled something. It hasn’t. Both sides are describing real pressures. Neither one is the whole picture, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells you it is.

What actually got me was a smaller comment further down, from someone who’s been tracking their own weekly shop since 2021. A hundred and eighteen dollars back then. A hundred and forty-two the next year. A hundred and sixty now, and only that low because they’ve cut back hard on meat and hunt the catalogues every week. That’s not an abstraction about margins or interchange fees. That’s someone doing actual accounting on their actual dinner, and the trend line is not their friend.

I’ve noticed the same thing at my local Coles without ever bothering to track it properly, which in hindsight I should have. The steak is thinner. I don’t mean that as a metaphor, though it works as one too. Someone in the thread described a “sirloin” cut so fine it folded over like a schnitzel and cooked through in about ninety seconds, and I laughed because I’ve had that exact steak. It’s the retail equivalent of shrinkflation but for meat, where the price stays roughly where you expect and the product quietly gets worse instead. Bread’s gone the same way at my local, apparently, hit or miss if you turn up after 3pm. Self-checkouts have multiplied while overnight restocking has thinned out, so you can hit an aisle at 7am and find gaps where the cereal used to be, staffed by nobody who could tell you why.

Here’s the tension I can’t tidy up: I think the wage and rent and energy explanations are partly true, and I also think it’s obviously convenient for the two supermarkets that dominate this market to let that explanation do the heavy lifting while they report record profits in the same news cycle. Both things are happening. The ACCC has already found evidence of price coordination behaviour between Coles and Woolworths that doesn’t require a conspiracy theory, just a duopoly with very little incentive to compete hard on price when the other bloke isn’t either. You don’t need moustache-twirling villains for a market to behave badly. You just need two players, thin competition, and captive customers who still need to eat.

None of this is unique to Melbourne, but I notice it here in specific ways. Aldi’s become the default for a lot of families I know, not out of loyalty but out of necessity, and there’s a particular kind of exhausted pride in figuring out which of the three or four supermarkets within driving distance has the cheapest mince this week. I do it myself. I’m not ashamed of it. But there’s something worth sitting with in the fact that a country this wealthy has turned grocery shopping into a logistics puzzle for ordinary families, while the companies running the puzzle post earnings that make headlines for the opposite reason.

I don’t have a neat fix, and anyone offering one in a Reddit comment thread probably doesn’t either. What I do think is that “it’s complicated” isn’t the same as “nothing can be done.” Divestiture powers, mandatory unit pricing, real teeth for the ACCC, government backing for smaller players like Aldi and the independents to actually compete on shelf space and supply chains, these are all things that get discussed and then quietly shelved. Meanwhile the steak keeps getting thinner and the trolley keeps costing more, and somewhere in outer suburban Melbourne someone’s doing the maths on their own weekly shop and getting the same answer I did: it’s not in your head, and it’s not just one thing either.