Consumer group CHOICE have launched a campaign urging consumers to be ‘unit pricing champions’ by crowdsourcing examples of bad unit pricing.
What is unit pricing?
Unit pricing can be a useful tool to save you money. But it isn’t perfect. Supermarkets try to make it difficult for us, they use small text, don’t display information correctly or don’t display the unit price at all!
The government is due to review unit pricing soon and they need to know there are issues with the current system. That’s where you come in. Get involved here.
Why is this an issue?
CHOICE compared the price of loose and prepacked formats of food items at Coles, Woolworths and Aldi supermarkets to compare how much people could save if they use unit pricing.
While the majority of shoppers believe loose fruit and vegetables are sold at a cheaper price than those that come in a packet, that’s not always the case.
We found that by using unit pricing to choose the cheapest food, our shoppers saved 20% at Aldi (on 6 items) and a 19% saving on the grocery bill at Coles and Woolworths (on 28 and 30 items respectively). If one of these baskets represented a weekly shop, consumers could save up to $1600 a year. Read more.
Common issues with unit pricing to look out for:
- Text is too small to read
- Text is too hard to find
- Unit pricing isn’t displayed for a product
- Unit pricing information is incorrect
- Unit pricing isn’t consistent across tags
- Unit pricing information is obscured (i.e. hidden by another tag or special sign)
Sign up here or email campaigns@choice.com.au with a picture of the issue, your state/territory and name of the supermarket.