A cheaper store is only cheaper if the drive doesn't eat the saving. This tool weighs the whole cost of a shop, groceries + petrol + your time, at your nearest PAK'nSAVE, New World and Woolworths, and tells you if the cheaper store is worth the extra kilometres.
How it works
- We read the same shelf prices you'd see on each retailer's own public website, no login, no account, nothing behind a paywall.
- Prices refresh overnight, once a night, with light, well-spaced requests. We read politely and never hammer a site.
- When you drop a pin we find your nearest store of each chain, price the basket at each, add the return drive (your ¢/km) and your time (your $/hour), and compare the all-in totals.
How we compare fairly
- Identical products only, national brands matched on brand + exact pack size + name, compared on normalised $/unit ($/kg, $/L, each).
- Only items stocked at all three of your nearest stores are counted.
- Prices are what you'd pay at the till, specials included, Woolworths Club price where it applies.
- We never silently match house brands. Pams is not Woolworths' own brand. Where a staple only exists as each chain's own brand or fresh produce, milk, butter, eggs, meat, veg, we don't guess. We use the published equivalence table below, so you can see exactly what we treated as equivalent.
On a like-for-like basket of 50 everyday staples, PAK'nSAVE is on average about 3% cheaper than Woolworths, a real but modest gap, not the double-digit figures often quoted. New World (same owner as PAK'nSAVE) is shown in the tool for completeness. Figures refresh nightly; see the live comparison for today's number.
The equivalence table
Every product we compare is declared in the open, each chain's comparable line, its pack size, and the normalised price. The cheapest of the three is marked ★. National = the exact same brand at all three; House = each chain's own brand (e.g. Pams ↔ Woolworths); Commodity = fresh produce and meat by the kilo.
Everyday staples
Browse every comparison
Our principles
- Transparent, everything we compare is stated. If you can't see how a number was reached, we haven't done our job.
- Independent, no retailer pays us. These are factual public prices; we don't take a side.
- Polite, we read lightly and overnight, and respect the sites we rely on.
- Private, we use only an approximate location to centre your map; we don't need to know who you are.