For those who celebrate Christmas, it is an occasion of giving and celebration – an opportunity to revel with loved ones and refresh at the end of the year.
But the festivities don’t come cheap. In fact, Christmas is one of the most expensive times of the year, with the average cost per household in Australia totalling $1,864.
Thanks to the current cost of living crisis, this year’s festive season is more expensive than ever. Consequently, it will also look very different for many people across the country.
According to a recent survey, the cost of living crisis is causing many Australians to change or cancel their Christmas plans. There’ll be less food on tables, fewer gifts under trees, and a smaller number of guests at celebrations. For roughly 1.6 million people, the financial stress is so severe that they are scrapping their Christmas plans altogether in order to save money.
One of the biggest expenses during the festive season is food, and to help mitigate the financial pain many are currently feeling, Australia’s two major supermarkets – Coles and Woolworths – have announced plans to temporarily drop the cost of a number of staple products across their stores, such as ham, lamb and prawns.
But while this gesture will provide some short-term relief to cash-strapped shoppers, it’s hard to believe in the generous spirit of Coles and Woolworths when you remember that both companies posted profits in excess of $1bn in the last financial year, with profit margins of between 5 and 6%.
This is in large part thanks to the effective duopoly these two retail giants have over Australia’s grocery market and the exorbitant price they have recently been charging for even the most basic goods, which will be the subject of a Senate inquiry early next year.
But groceries haven’t always been so expensive in Australia.
Back in 2017, Coles created budget-friendly recipes as part of its “feed your family for under $10” campaign. One such recipe was for a cottage pie, which included 500g beef mince, one litre of liquid beef stock, two carrots, five brushed potatoes, two brown onions, two cloves of garlic and 250g of butter.
Today, as the ABC reports, it would cost $23.80 to make this recipe using the same ingredients bought from Coles – a 138% increase.
Another $10 recipe included in Coles’s campaign was for fettuccine bolognese – the ingredients for which now cost $24.67, a 146% increase.
The supermarkets claim the hike in the price of groceries is the result of economic circumstances beyond their control, such as inflation and higher wholesale prices to suppliers.
But it is difficult to square this argument with the fact that many suppliers are actually selling their goods at record low prices. Indeed, some livestock farmers are even going to the extreme of shooting their cattle and lambs rather than selling them because the price they are being paid isn’t enough to cover their production costs, even though the retail cost for some meat products has increased up to 15% over the last two years.
So, what is really going on with grocery prices in Australia? Are Woolworths and Coles price gouging, as Greens and independent MPs such as Monique Ryan claim? And should they be allowed to further expand their dominance of the grocery sector by opening a further 50 new supermarkets between them in the next year, as they plan to do?
Perhaps the upcoming Senate inquiry will provide the gift of answers to some of these questions. Even if it does, however, it will be little consolation for the thousands of people in pain at a time of year that is meant to be reserved for celebration.
Drew Rooke is a freelance journalist and writer. His most recent book, A Witness of Fact: The Peculiar Case of Chief Forensic Pathologist Colin Manock (Scribe Publications, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly award for best true crime
