Paradise tax – CI v NZ supermarket comparison, May 2023

 

With the cost of living crisis top of mind for us all – and even coined ‘Cozzie Livs’ by one uni student on the NZ news last week – I thought it would be an interesting exercise to do a comparison of some of our standard grocery shop items here in Rarotonga v one back in New Zealand. There are three supermarkets here on the island, with the main one, CITC, also owning most of the petrol stations here which stock a decent range of groceries 7 days a week (all but one of the supermarkets is closed on a Sunday which takes getting used to). Supermarkets are supplemented by locals selling their produce on the side of the road, dotted around the island and at the main market on week days and especially on a Saturday when the market’s in full swing.

A recent snap of the imported fruit and veg section at the main supermarket here

We get most Countdown/Woolworths brand foods here, plus Pams items. Often items won’t be in stock for weeks – like mealmate crackers, or the Countdown brand butter, or chicken nuggets for a few weeks there (the kids managed to survive). There’s no basmati rice on the island at the moment, which is less troublesome than late last year when the island ran out of petrol, but it’s still something to get used to. I’ve certainly become far more flexible with what I’m aiming to buy and there is no point sticking to a meal plan. Sometimes there are no apples or oranges aside from extremely expensive ones ($24kg mandarins today for instance), but we can usually find apples, and always bananas or tinned fruit. This means we tend to stock up on things when they are in the supermarket and are glad for our chest freezer and good sized pantry to let us do so.

When it comes to milk, we buy a carton of 12L of long-life milk at $33, compared to $2.20 a litre for long life milk at Countdown. The price of bread is regulated and there is only one provider of loaves of sandwich-type bread. It all tastes bland but is passable for toast or a toasted sandwich but is 1.5 times the price for similar bread at Countdown. The real killer for us is the cost of butter which is currently $11.50 for 500g compared to $6.50 in NZ. Perhaps we should become vegan?

Oddly, the price for 400g of dried apricots is pretty much the same, at $12 in NZ compared with $12.30 here. It looks like mince is about the same price too, and a 12 pack of Corona is $1 cheaper here.

The really big difference is the lack of range here. There aren’t specials with brands competing against each other on price – the selected is too limited. It’s interesting to compare that to the number of special prices/discounts on my fake Countdown order. The main time there are specials is for stock that’s expired or near expiry, and yep, we buy expired stock all the time, especially if it can go in the freezer (we currently have 8 bags of 6 mini bagels at half price, $3.70, on special for school lunchboxes, and chocolate chips for baking are often on special and live in our freezer). Nor can you get a 3-for-the-price-of-2 deal, or things like baked beans in a three pack. Often biscuits have had a rough ride on the boat to get here so are crushed before they’re even open, so they get saved for baking.

Our diets are much simpler here, with far less variation. Frozen chickens are always in stock so we have roast chicken on the bbq once or twice a week, with local veggies (, cucumber, lettuce) topped up with imported veggies like carrots, potatoes and capsicum ($10.50 a kg this week). If we’re lucky, a friend’s avocado tree has just produced, or we spot someone selling tomatoes on the side of the road, or we saw expired feta at the shop to jazz things up, and we supplement with frozen veggies too. When in season, there are plenty of fresh fruit around, with J a fan of starfruit especially, but none of us that hot on pawpaw. We make our own easiyo which works out at half the price of a kg of Fresh and Fruity or similar here, although J hates it and E isn’t a massive fan so they don’t get yoghurt unless it’s in a smoothie. And as I’m not working full time, I do much more baking for lunchboxes, although with the price of butter I don’t think that makes financial sense some weeks tbh.

An interesting exercise to do, with the cost of my fake shop here in Rarotonga coming in at $203.90 compared to the Countdown online order at $162.95. A whole other framing for this is that the minimum wage here in the Cook Islands is $9 compared to $22.70 in New Zealand, and Dean’s salary is half what it was in NZ, but it’s too nuanced a comparison to capture fairly in a blog post, so I won’t!

Instead, come visit, bring us groceries, and see for yourself.

A screenshot of the 'fake' Countdown order I did as part of this post, demonstrating the items with savings