Do groceries cost more in WA? What the east-west price data actually shows
We price the same products in Perth and on the east coast every week. The gap is real — but it's not where you'd expect.
Ask a sandgroper at the checkout and they'll swear everything costs more west of the Nullarbor. Ask the supermarkets and they'll point to "national pricing". We collect prices from Perth and east-coast store views every week, for the same products, so we can answer with data instead of vibes — and the truth is more interesting than either story.
At Coles, the shelf price barely moves — except in the produce aisle
Comparing the same products between a Perth Coles and an east-coast Coles, about 97% were priced identically. National pricing is mostly real for packaged groceries.
The 3% that differs is nearly all fresh produce — and there the gaps aren't subtle. A punnet of raspberries we tracked was $4.00 in the east and $6.50 in WA on the same day. Freight, seasonality and local supply do their work on anything perishable.
Specials behave the same way: when an item is on special in both regions, the special price matches. What changes is which items are ranged and promoted at all — a page of east-coast produce specials can be mostly absent from the WA listing, and vice versa.
At IGA, the west really does pay more
IGA stores price independently, and it shows. In our sample of the same products at a Perth IGA versus an east-coast IGA, only about one in five shared products had the same price — and where they differed, the Perth store was dearer roughly nine times out of ten. Fresh produce was often two to three times the east-coast price.
That's not IGA being naughty — independent grocers carry independent cost structures, and WA freight is what it is. But it means an east-coast price feed tells a Perth IGA shopper almost nothing.
The bigger story: WA shops from a different catalogue
The price gap gets the headlines, but the range gap matters more day to day. Roughly one in five products in a WA Coles store view doesn't exist in the east-coast catalogue at all — think Brownes and Harvey Fresh dairy, Masters milk, Mundella yoghurt and a long tail of WA-only lines. At IGA the effect is stronger still: the majority of a Perth store's range is specific to that store.
A price app built on an east-coast feed doesn't just get WA prices wrong — it can't even see half the WA trolley.
How Mai Pantry handles the divide
We collect Perth store views directly — Coles WA fresh prices, WA specials sweeps, IGA Perth stores and both ALDI regions — and the app shows the price for your region, not a national average. WA shoppers see Brownes at its WA price; east-coast shoppers aren't shown WA-only products they can't buy.
One list, five retailers, your region's actual prices.