The Supermarket Question Nobody Has a Clean Answer To

Someone posted online recently asking where people do their grocery shopping. Simple enough question. The thread ran long and the range of answers was genuinely interesting, not because anyone said anything revolutionary, but because it illustrated just how much cognitive load the average household is quietly carrying around something as mundane as buying butter beans.

The short answer from most people: Aldi for the bulk of it, one of the big two for the gaps. That’s more or less where my household has landed too, though we arrived there slowly and without any particular plan.

We’ve been Woolworths people for years, mostly out of inertia. The Everyday Rewards card accumulated points at a rate that felt meaningful without ever quite being meaningful. You get a discount here, a freebie there. It’s fine. It’s designed to feel fine. Whether it actually saves money in aggregate is something I’ve never sat down and properly calculated, which is probably the point.

Aldi is the honest alternative. No loyalty programme, no app nudging you toward deals on things you didn’t need. What you see is roughly what it costs. Someone in that thread mentioned butter beans at 90 cents a can versus $1.80 at Woolworths. That’s not a marginal difference. That’s the same product at half the price and it just sits there on the shelf without requiring you to scan anything.

The limitation is real though. Aldi’s range is narrow by design, which is simultaneously its best and worst feature. You get in and out quickly, which I appreciate more than I used to. But if someone in your household has specific dietary needs, you’re filling gaps elsewhere. Several people in the thread mentioned exactly this, coeliac or gluten-free requirements being the most common reason to keep a Woolworths or Coles relationship alive alongside an Aldi habit.

The click and collect angle is one I find genuinely compelling, especially the argument from people who are time-poor and solo parenting or working full-time with young kids. The calculation isn’t just dollars. It’s Saturday morning. It’s the mental overhead of list-making versus browsing. One person in the thread was refreshingly honest about it: they knew Aldi was cheaper, but left to their own devices in a physical store they’d overspend anyway. Click and collect at Coles kept them on list. That’s not a character flaw, that’s just how retail environments work.

I notice we spend differently in-store versus online too. Online feels more deliberate. In-store has a texture to it that’s specifically engineered to pull you slightly off course, and it mostly works.

There’s a version of this discussion that turns into a broader critique of Woolworths and Coles and the market power they hold, the Senate inquiry, the pricing behaviour during inflation, the supplier squeeze. All of that is real and worth caring about. At the same time I don’t think shopping at Aldi is a political act in any meaningful sense. It’s just cheaper and reasonably good. Those two things are enough.

What I’m actually going to do is start tracking the shop more carefully. Not obsessively, just enough to know whether the rewards card is doing what it implies it’s doing. My suspicion is that the answer will be “sort of, sometimes, not as much as it feels like.” But I’d rather know than assume.

The produce question is the one that still nags at me. A couple of people mentioned Box Divvy for fresh fruit and vegetables, which I hadn’t heard of. The idea of shifting fifty dollars a week away from the majors for better quality seasonal produce has an obvious appeal. That one is worth looking into properly rather than just nodding at.

No single store has everything. That much is settled. The rest is just working out which compromises suit your life, and being honest about the trade-offs you’re actually making versus the ones you tell yourself you’re making.