The Best* Food for the Lowest** Price!

supermarket

Corporate O'Capitalism A completely unsponsored*** post about our good**** supermarket!

Hey, welcome to our supermarket! Here you can buy all the food you want for a low, low price! As well, check out our real estate, here you can buy one house for the low price of… $1,053,483?! How much is everyone earning? $58,836 a year? How long will it take someone at that wage to afford one house? 18 YEARS?! WHERE YOU’RE WORKING THE WHOLE TIME?! But, uh... don’t worry, oil prices are only… three dollars a litre?! An all time high?! Maybe we need to rethink this.

New Zealand is facing a cost of living crisis, everything we need to live is hideously overpriced, house prices are going up faster than we can catch up to, and the rate that they’re increasing is increasing! New Zealand’s homelessness rates are higher than every other country in the OECD, petrol prices are at an all time high due to the war in Ukraine, and people’s wages aren’t being increased to match them. So while people’s wages are increasing, it’s still not enough to keep up with the rising prices. Compared to other countries, everything is so much more expensive! But, all of this is fine, because as Jacinda Adern wisely said, “There is no cost of living crisis” (though, she did later admit that she was wrong because wow that is out of touch).

One of the main reasons why everything is so expensive is the supermarket duopoly. Currently, there are two companies who own the entire supermarket industry, Foodstuffs and Woolworths. These two companies account for all of New Zealand’s supermarkets, Woolworths owning Countdown, SuperValue, and Fresh Choice, and Foodstuffs, owning New World, Pak n’ Save, and Four Square. As there’s no real competition in the supermarket industry except with these two companies, they are free to jack up the price as high as they want, and almost every month, the food prices have increased .

As well, one of the reasons why housing is so expensive right now is because people are making money from it. In 2011, an average house in Auckland cost $480,000, but now they cost $1,053,483, around half a million dollars more. In fact, because of this, many people are buying houses just for the sake of making money, which leads to more people having to rent homes, leading to decreased supply of houses, leading to higher demand, leading to higher prices, leading to houses being sold for lots of money, and no one being able to afford them.

As well, recently oil prices in New Zealand have hit an all time high at three dollars per litre. To put that into perspective, in the US, oil only costs around $1.77 (NZD) a litre. The main reason for the hike in prices is the war in Ukraine. One of Russia’s biggest exports is refined petroleum, and a lot of the petrol in New Zealand comes from Russia. But because Russia has gone to war with Ukraine, Aotearoa has cut ties with Russia and has stopped importing Russian oil. Because of this, oil supply has gone down, a lot, and because of this, and high GST on oil (which the government has now cut, FYI), the oil prices have shot up.

New Zealand is a very expensive place to live, and it’s having a huge effect on many people. Real, living people in NZ right now are unable to afford the bare minimum of what is required to live, and it's taking its toll. House prices are high, food prices are high, and the average salary is too low to be able to afford them. It’s easy to think that the government will just lend us a hand and just make it go away, but that can’t happen if we just let National and Labour get into Parliament every election. At the end of the day, all these parties do is say there’s a problem, promise to fix it, never do, wait for the opposition to call them out, and when the other party gets the majority seat, they do the exact same thing. In 2015, John Key turned a blind eye to what was happening and claimed that Auckland did not have a housing crisis, and in 2022, Jacinda Adern said that there was no cost of living crisis. If we just keep electing them, nothing will change. During the 2017 election, Labour promised to help with all these problems, mental health, education, public transport, and of course, the housing crisis. Of course, five years later, barely any progress has been made, and when National inevitably gets elected again, the same thing will happen.

If you want to make a difference, don't vote for Labour or National, vote for one of the smaller parties, some good choices are TOP, the Maori Party, and Greens, because unlike the major parties, they might actually do something.

...So, are you gonna buy anything or what?

*Best in comparison to worse supermarkets. **Lowest price in comparison to more expensive places. ***Not explicitly true if you consider $1,000,000 upfront payments sponsorships. ****Good is also a subjective term

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