Supermarket in Australia

Hello! Today I am going to quick explain how supermarkets are in general here in Australia.

If you are reading this post, there’s a great chance you are either here studying in the country or planning to come to study. In other words, probably you are or will be a student in Australia.

As I said many times here in this blog, students have always less money due to work limitation and to expensive rents and school fees. So you have to save money in many ways, and one way is to buying cheaper things in the supermarket.

Here in Sydney we have many food stores and options to buy products. But the 4 main supermarkets are Coles, Aldi, Woolworths and IGA. I personally think IGA is the most expensive one, and they are normally located in more residential areas, where people don’t really need to use cars to access them. I bought from IGA during some months, but then realized how much cheaper Coles and ALDI are.

In fact, if you really want to save money and to always buy the cheapest option, you could go to all of them checking product by product, price by price, and making a list of what are the cheapest products in which supermarket. Then you proceed to each market, buy them and save some money.

Another nice thing is that every week supermarkets put some specific products in promotion, like dish washing products, laundry products, meat, sauces, bread and etc. Aldi for example has a small catalogue for “week specials” , showing all products in promotion in the stores. Coles and Woolworths do similar things. You just need to check and to do a small research.

One thing that I’ve never seen in Brazil, and I do see here, is the fact that some supermarkets have their own brand for almost all products, and they’re always cheaper. For example if you go to a Coles to buy chocolate, you will find all normal brands like Lindt, Ferrero Rocher, Kinder, etc but also Coles chocolate. Ok, being fair, Coles products are always cheaper and have a decent quality. But they are not the same level of other brands. Is up to you to decide and analyze value for money in these cases.

One last interesting fact about supermarkets: here you can checkout by yourself. I know many countries already have this process, but not in Brazil. Unfortunately I know that the places that tried this kind of checkout there lost lots of money due to dishonest people taking products without paying. But here you can just scan the products, put them in the bags, chose the payment method you prefer and go home.

Do you have any questions about supermarkets, prices, where to buy specific products and etc? Just leave a comment and I will be glad to answer!

Thanks, see you guys