Stark truth hidden in Aldi receipt as cost of living soars

Many people shop at Aldi because it’s cheaper – but when compared to Woolworths which supermarket really comes out on top?

ANALYSIS

Going to the shops is getting a lot more expensive. The latest official inflation data shows the price of supermarket items has risen 9.2 per cent over the past year.

I used to just buy a lot at Woolworths online but now I try to go to Aldi a bit more. Partly to save money, partly to get a bit of variety from the standard Woolies items, partly to get my hands on some exciting special buys.

I’ve got two little kids, and my grocery bills are definitely higher than they were back in the day. My partner and I used to drop $200 on a shop, now it’s often $300 or more.

I’m not saying we’re trying to minimise what we spend. We could eat just rice and lentils and live a lot more cheaply. I am saying that if I can buy the things I want for less, I want to do that – including pecans, red meat, wasteful snack foods etc.

This is a shot of my receipt from a recent trip to Aldi: as you can see, I spent $247.03.

(This is actually not the whole receipt, some is cut off at the top of the picture because it wouldn’t fit.)

A typical weekly receipt from Aldi for Jason Murphy. Picture: Supplied

But how does that compare? I decided to crack open the Woolies website and see if I could cross-reference things.

Here’s what I found. Aldi is cheaper on most things. About 50 cents less on some items that are easy to compare, like a 150 gram block of manchego cheese, or a nine-pack of mini hot cross buns. But only one cent cheaper on some basic things, like a 700 gram pack of Cornflakes (comparing Woolies home brand at $2.80 to Aldi’s brand at $2.79), or a litre of basic UHT milk.

There was one item where Aldi is way cheaper: paracetamol for 75 cents (the cheapest one at Woolworths is $2).

There were a couple of items where Woolies was cheaper. Pecans, for example. I like to eat pecans and I thought Aldi was cheap at $10.99 for 400 grams, but Woolworths is selling the same weight for $10.93. The capsicums at Woolies were less too, if you buy the Odd Bunch (NB I didn’t compare the Woolies website on the exact same day I shopped at Aldi, and fresh food prices can bounce around.)

The problem in comparing Aldi to Woolies

But the more I tried to compare prices between Woolies and Aldi the harder it got. Yeah, there’s weight differences between the packages. For example the Farmer’s Union Greek Yoghurt they sell at Aldi is 930g not a kilogram like the pack they sell at Woolies. But that wouldn’t be hard to control for, it’s just maths.

The really hard part was controlling for quality. My confidence I could compare the two supermarkets totally fell apart when I got to peanut butter. I eat so much peanut butter I can tell the difference between brands. I’m like a peanut butter connoisseur, I guess. (What you’re a connoisseur of tells you something about a person – this tells you I’m basic!).

Aldi sells a bunch of different brands, and the one I bought most recently is a dark roast, costing $3.29 for 375 grams. It’s a crunchy peanut butter, and it’s oily. It will have been made by a major peanut butter company exclusively for Aldi and sold under their brand. I looked through Woolworths options trying to find something to compare it to.

Woolworths sells the peanut butter I consider the best – Mayver’s dark roast. That’s currently on sale for $5.80 for 375 grams. (It was $5 a year ago, so it has risen in price by a whopping 16 per cent.)

But is the Aldi one comparable to the Mayver’s? No way! My refined peanut butter palette says there’s no comparison, but to be fair, I checked the ingredient list and both of them are just made of peanuts and sea salt. On paper, they’re identical products, but to me? No way.

Aldi is generally cheaper than Woolies but can the products be compared like for like? Picture: NCA NewsWire/Tertius Pickard

This got me thinking.

So I looked through all the other things on the list, and the same could be true for them. The items look the same – but are they? The manchego cheese? Who can say if the quality is the same? Mayonnaise is another classic one: you can make it with fancy egg yolk or cheap canola oil and still call it mayo.

Even the pecans could be different in terms of freshness, or fat and protein content. The Aldi yoghurt pouch that I fed to my kid while we were still in Aldi to stop him crying? It probably has a totally different protein, fat and sugar ratio to the ones in Woolworths.

Woolworths is more expensive than Aldi but they offer completely different products.

I’m not saying Aldi stuff has to be worse, either. I’ve eaten Aldi’s Choceur chocolate and I’ve eaten Cadbury’s and the Aldi stuff is so much better there’s no comparison. It’s more akin to Lindt or Whittaker’s (in my opinion, anyway. I’m not going to claim to be a chocolate connoisseur).

So comparing these two supermarkets is a nightmare when you actually care about subtle differences between the items. It’s a bit like what Bunnings does. They promise to price match an identical item, but the things they sell can be different to what you can buy elsewhere so it’s tough to do a direct price comparison.

I guess the trick is to not be fussy. If I’m willing to stop buying my favourite peanut butter, I can save $2.50 a jar. But where do I stop? I don’t want to end up eating crappy homebrand stuff that tastes bad and is bad for you just because of a bit of inflation.

Jason Murphy is an economist | @jasemurphy. He is the author of the book Incentivology