Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Would you Answer 13 Questions for a Free $500 Grocery Gift Card?



A free grocery coupon can save you a lot of money if you have the luxury of finding one in your area. Unfortunately, here in Australia we have some of the most expensive groceries in the world apparently according to some recent surveys. This doesn't surprise me because when you have lived in an overseas country for any lengthy period of time you get a very different perspective on a lot of things including groceries.

Groceries may sound like a mundane and uninteresting topic for an article but just remember that everyone gets hungry once or twice a day. It's only the really lucky ones who get to satisfy that hunger.

Even so, with the cost of living rising dramatically in most western countries, most housewives or grocery buyers are all looking for the best deals they can find. What can be saved on the groceries can go a long way towards paying off those rising energy bills. It's a bit like "robbing Peter to pay Paul" but as most families today are what Australians call "battlers" ( those who live from payday to payday) any savings are more than welcomed.

Here in Australia, our grocery costs are largely dictated by two major players who are in cahoots no matter how much they may deny it to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.   It is an impossible ask of an under-funded and under-staffed Govt sanctioned organization to be able to adequately monitor large shareholder Companies like Coles and Woolworths. The other player in the Australian grocery scene is the Independent Grocers Association (IGA) but they don't yet have the numbers to  access or control the buying power like the big two. And the big two are everywhere in Australia from the remote inland locations of regional towns in the outback to every suburb in the big cities.

And the "little Aussie Battlers" are Australia wide but we get offered 'weekly specials' in our mailboxes every two weeks or so and that is the best we get until we get a chance at Christmas time to enter a competition for free groceries. The big two grocery supermarkets in Australia don't have to work very hard to make a profit or to get their fair share of the buying public. Everyone has to eat. Every now and then for the sake of appearances, the big two will put on a marketing show for us so that we can never be absolutely sure they are in cahoots and some towns will benefit from these activities but rarely do they extend beyond state borders.

As you have probably gathered, Australians are not well served by their stores that sell groceries and it is something that the Australian Federal Government is talking about investigating but there aren't too many 'Aussie battlers' who are holding their breathe for this to happen. People seem to think it will go the same way as the Petrol price investigation.

So most Australian "battlers" will just have to wait until next Christmas to have another chance at winning any free grocery coupons. Would you answer 13 questions for a FREE $500 free grocery coupon?I know I would if it was available in my geo-location!