Someone's Been Watching Woolworths, and the Data is Fascinating
A Reddit post caught my eye this week that I think deserves a lot more attention than it’s probably getting. Someone has spent the last 18 months meticulously tracking Woolworths catalogue pricing data — actual receipts, actual numbers — and has now made it all publicly available in a Google Sheet. Given that the ACCC is currently sniffing around supermarket pricing practices, the timing couldn’t be more pointed.
My first reaction was honestly just admiration. Eighteen months. That’s not a weekend project. That’s a commitment. As someone who works in tech and has a reasonable appreciation for the unglamorous grind of data collection, I know how tedious this kind of thing gets. You start enthusiastic, then life happens, and somewhere around month four you’re questioning all your choices. This person kept going, and now we have something genuinely useful.
The data itself is sparking some interesting debate online. Some people are pointing at individual products — cherries were one example — and noting that prices do go up and down with seasons and demand, which is fair. The immediate rebuttal, of course, was a perfectly timed “you can’t cherry pick one data point” pun that I appreciated more than I should have. But beyond the jokes, there’s a more serious observation buried in the thread: even if prices do cycle up and down, the floor of those cycles rarely returns to where it started. Prices bounce, sure, but they seem to bounce within a range that drifts steadily upward. That’s the thing that gets people, and rightly so.
One person ran a quick calculation that caught my attention. If you’d bought one of every tracked item back in March 2024, it would have cost you around $317,000. The same basket today? About $346,000. That’s roughly an 8.9% increase over 18 months. Now obviously nobody is buying every item in the Woolworths catalogue — that would be a very different kind of lifestyle — but as a directional signal, it’s meaningful. Someone else threw the data into Claude and got rough annualised figures showing about 5% up in one year, 2% down the next, with coffee and eggs leading the charge at around 20% increases. I work with data professionally and I know you have to be careful about what conclusions you draw from 18 months of partial data, but these numbers aren’t nothing.
What I find particularly interesting is the shrinkflation angle, which I think is actually the more insidious issue. Sticker price is easy to track. Package size? Much harder. If a bag of chips quietly goes from 200g to 170g while the price stays the same, that doesn’t show up as a price rise — but your hip pocket absolutely knows about it. The data collector themselves flagged this as a key question worth investigating: are we seeing the same SKU appearing multiple times with different sizing over time? That would be the smoking gun for shrinkflation, and it’s exactly the kind of analysis the ACCC should be doing if they’re serious about this inquiry.
The community response to the raw data has been lovely, honestly. Someone built a quick website using Claude to visualise individual product price trends over time — connected to the spreadsheet, proper search functionality, the works. It appeared within what felt like hours of the original post. That’s the internet at its best: one person does the hard boring work of collection, someone else makes it accessible, and suddenly a useful public resource exists where there wasn’t one before. No corporate budget, no committee, just people who care about a problem solving it together.
The broader political context here matters. Australia’s supermarket duopoly — really, it’s Coles and Woolworths carving up the market between them, with everyone else scrambling for scraps — has been a topic of serious policy discussion lately. The ACCC inquiry is ongoing, and there’s been genuine political pressure from both sides of the aisle, which is rare enough to be noteworthy. But inquiries have a habit of producing lengthy reports that sit on shelves. What actually changes consumer behaviour and corporate behaviour is transparency — real, accessible, searchable data that ordinary people can use to make informed choices and that journalists can use to hold companies accountable.
This spreadsheet is a small piece of that transparency. It’s not perfect — the data format is a bit rough, there’s no category tagging, and 18 months is a relatively short window — but it exists, it’s public, and it’s honest. I’d love to see someone do the same for Coles. And Aldi, while we’re at it. Wouldn’t it be something if we had a proper, community-maintained price index for Australian supermarkets that anyone could query? That feels like exactly the kind of civic infrastructure that should exist but somehow doesn’t, because there’s no profit motive to build it.
If you’re interested in your own grocery spending, it’s genuinely worth bookmarking that visualisation site and occasionally checking in on products you buy regularly. Knowledge is leverage, and right now, consumers need all the leverage they can get.