Grocery Prices From Selected Supermarkets- October 2020

• For the first time in a while we were able to survey all four leading supermarket chains:
  • OK supermarkets
  • Pick N Pay (TM)
  • Choppies and
  • FoodWorld
• Due to COVID-19 restrictions, our surveys may not include some shops that we would normally include in our survey. In this case, we were to survey all the four leading supermarket chains.
• Prices in other supermarkets are within 5% of the above prices. Where the prices seem too different it is because different brands of the item were surveyed in the two shops being compared. We look for the cheapest but popular brands. We don’t always look at the cheapest brand for example:
  • Nurse tissues are among the cheaper brands but they are not the cheapest. They are the cheapest widely accepted brand. Other cheaper brands are frankly rubbish
  • We look at Sunlight, Surf and Maq when it comes to the cheapest washing powder brands, however, we don’t normally include brilliant although it is the cheapest brand out there. Housewives just don’t like or buy much of it with packets spending months on shelves.
  • We only include real white/long grain rice but don’t include broken white rice although it is cheaper
  • For popular items, we list separate items, for example, dilutable drinks. We don’t do this for items such as matches and candles. People don’t usually care about brands here.
• Our sample analysis shows that prices of the other Big Four supermarket chains are within 2-5% range of each other’s prices

Prices last updated 1 September 2020

Something to note

Despite repeated denials by both government and businesses, there is an undeniable link between prices and black market exchange rates.

A word about inflation

Zimbabwe’s prices have been going up since 2018. This coincided with the introduction and rise of both the bond notes and RTGS dollar which were essentially the Zimbabwean dollar(ZWL). The government finally admitted this in February 2019 and passed laws marking its return in June of 2019.

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