Live in the inner suburbs of the cities? It’s tough enough for every Australian with the cost of living across the country, but for inner suburbs locals, something is making things even more difficult: The disappearance of supermarkets.
As reported recently by the ABC, supermarkets are gradually disappearing from the inner suburbs and are being replaced by “metro” or “Local” branded stores. These are smaller than supermarkets, and aim to be more convenient. You’ll find cooked meals ready to go, sushi, and a carefully tailored range of products.
That sounds good enough, but there’s a catch: Where supermarkets have regulated prices across all stores, metros – even when they’re run by one of the supermarket brands (for example, Woolworths Metro) are not, and you can be sure that those stores are taking advantage of the perception that inner city residents are affluent. ‘
The ABC report does a great job of breaking down how people can end up spending significantly more for exactly the same shopping items by going to one of these metro over a supermarket.
There are plenty of excuses that they’ll make for why this is the case. For one, land value is more expensive in the inner suburbs, so the overheads of running a supermarket are greater.
Furthermore, when the stores need to be smaller, they need to have a more curated range. Rather than try and sell products at all price points, these stores aim to offer a higher standard of product, such as good cuts of meat or a dedicated cheese room, and for better quality produce, people should be willing to spend more.
But that philosophy isn’t going to help those who just need to get a weekly shop done and aren’t looking for a treat. For people simply trying to manage their daily expenses, these metro stores are increasingly at odds with what they need their grocery store to provide. Unfortunately, there’s not much that residents can do about it, since, as mentioned, those big supermarkets are going…
Or is there?
There are some significant advantages to living in the inner suburbs too. Most critical is the logistics. Deliveries into the city, because there tend to be more people playing orders, can happen more frequently.
For example, did you know that Good & Fugly delivers to Sydney locations on every day of the week? In more regional areas, like Wollongong or the Central Coast, customers can choose between two different delivery days, but our inner suburbs customers can enjoy the convenience of delivery on any weekday.
And because our supply chain follows the same process everywhere that we deliver, prices don’t fluctuate depending on where you live. The savings that you enjoy from a box of Good & Fugly are the savings that customers anywhere else in the country enjoy.
With the addition of our Fugly Extras, which includes eggs, coffee, non-dairy milk, and treats and snacks, we can cover a lot of your essentials without you ever needing to step into a metro store.
For other items, you can shop around, too. There are plenty of online stores covering just about every kind of food, and they will all deliver to inner-city locations with no problem.
For people who do live in the inner suburbs, perhaps it’s time to start looking at the “supermarket” brands and their new metro concepts in the same way that we look at convenience stores: They have a role to play when you need something specific, but the premium that they charge means that they are not fit for purpose for everyday living.
