79% of Australians think supermarkets are gouging them. Here's how to check for yourself.

Almost nobody thinks prices are fair

According to a Finder survey of more than 1,000 Australians, 79% believe supermarkets are engaging in price gouging. Only 4% said it has never happened. The rest are either unsure or think it was happening before but has stopped.

Whether you call it supermarket price gouging, margin padding, or just inflation doing its thing, the feeling is the same at the checkout: this costs more than it should.

The average Australian household now spends $207 a week on groceries, up from $189 two years ago. Parents report spending $274. And 39% of Australians say groceries are one of their top three most stressful expenses, ahead of petrol and power bills.

The problem with feelings about prices

Here's the thing about believing you're being ripped off: you might be right, or you might be anchoring to what milk cost in 2019. Both are happening at the same time.

Supermarkets say their costs have gone up. Shoppers say the profits look pretty healthy for companies that claim to be doing it tough. The ACCC and the Federal Court have already found that some pricing practices were genuinely misleading. It's messy.

But there's one part of this you can actually settle yourself. Not the macro question of whether Coles or Woolworths is gouging at scale. The personal one: is this specific product in my trolley actually more expensive than it used to be, and is the "special" price genuinely low?

What checking actually looks like

Price history is the closest thing to a receipt for what something used to cost. If a box of cereal was $5.50 for months, jumped to $7, and is now "on special" at $6, that's not really a deal. It's a markup with a yellow sticker.

Discount Trolley tracks recent price history across Coles, Woolworths, and ALDI where data is available. You can look up a product and see whether the current price is genuinely low compared to what it has been sitting at.

That's not a gotcha. It's just information. The kind of information that turns "I reckon they've bumped this up" into "yeah, they actually did bump this up" or "no, this one's been steady, it's the one next to it that moved."

Comparing stores without the guesswork

The Finder survey quotes Sarah Megginson suggesting shoppers compare unit prices and switch between retailers. That's solid advice. The tricky bit is doing it without spending your Sunday afternoon wandering three different shops.

Searching a product in Discount Trolley shows you current prices across supported retailers in one place. You can see whether Woolworths or Coles has it cheaper this week, or whether ALDI's version undercuts both. No tabs, no catalogues, no spreadsheet.

It won't cover every product at every store. But for the 20 to 40 items most households buy on repeat, it gives you a clearer picture than gut feel.

Watching the items that matter to your budget

If your grocery bill is $207 a week and trending up, you probably can't audit every line item. But you can watch the ones that hurt the most.

Adding staples to a watchlist means you get notified when prices drop. Over time, that builds a pattern: you start to know when butter goes on a real special versus when the price just bounces around. You stop reacting to every yellow tag and start buying at genuinely good prices.

That's not a fix for systemic pricing problems. It's a fix for the part that's in your control: knowing what you're paying, whether it's actually a deal, and where to get it cheapest this week.

The gouging debate will keep going. Your grocery bill doesn't have to wait.

Parliament, the ACCC, and the supermarkets will keep arguing about what counts as fair pricing. That's important work, but it won't change your checkout total this Saturday.

What can change it is knowing what your regular items actually cost, catching real drops instead of fake ones, and comparing stores without wasting an hour. That's the bit Discount Trolley is built for.

Questions shoppers still ask