> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Side Street, the Two Logos and the Nudge - URL: https://goodoil.news/the-side-street-the-two-logos-and-the-nudge/ - Published: 2026-09-23T22:00:54.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-23T22:00:53.000Z - Description: A musty smell is on this one too. - Author: Guest Post - Tags: NZ Politics, Economy **LilBaP** Once upon a recent weekday, New Zealand discovered – or should I say the politicians discovered – a supermarket problem. Two groups held most of the grocery trolley. Prices hurt. Every party grew a supermarket policy like a mushroom after rain. Split them. Fine them. Buy 120 of them and call it KiwiMart. All very urgent. All very now. All just slogans. The lawyers are cheering. The average person is not doing a market study – they are watching the wallet. Bread, mince, petrol, diesel, the power bill…That is inflation as it is lived, week by week. Government could be honest about which part of that pile it actually controls and what it can do. Instead it reaches for the old reflex: if a private firm is large, break it up. That sounds like a vote they can hear in the distance. Nobody wanted to start the story where it actually started: on the side street, in the carpark – or was it the 1pm podium of truth? It probably started before that. Covid just sped up the pace. The small, locally owned, food shops were declared non-starters for your custom. The friendly butcher you were on first-name terms with. The fruit-and-veg shop that knew which peaches and lettuce you wanted and made sure they were there. Closed. Shut. No regard. The supermarket, being the ‘essential provider’, stayed on with preference. That was not an accident of nature, but a nudge. There is a lot of nudging going on in our world – take the name New Zealand being nudged toward a Māori alternative, as an example. Anyway: stay home, use the big-logo market. The small place will still be there later. A lot of them were not. Loyal custom does not hibernate for two years. It disappears. Years later the same laborious political family – and, to be fair, the other major as well – stood in an aisle and announced that the problem was a lack of competition. Over many successive governments they allowed a duopoly. During Covid they allowed it to become a monster. Now they want to cut the tail off. The Commerce Commission’s last grocery report still has Foodstuffs and Woolworths on 82 per cent of the national market. That figure has hardly moved since 2020\. The other 18 per cent is everyone else – including the shops that were told to lock the door. If you want a third force that is not a press release, you do not nationalise a hundred stores. You let a small operator buy stock at a price that is not a punishment. You encourage better supply chain contracts for the small operator. If you can run a Provincial Growth Fund, why not an SME fund to assist these partnerships – with checks and balances, of course. Our governments are willing to provide welfare to many who never contribute to the community. Why not assist some small business owners who do? The cost would be minimal compared with the legal battles that come from trying to split the current duopoly. Busting up private businesses because the electorate is angry is not a cost-of-living plan: it is an ideology with a grocery trolley made in China. The second chapter is the one the slogans skip. The Reserve Bank has pushed the OCR to 2.75 per cent because headline inflation hit 4.1 per cent in the June quarter. Take vehicle fuels out of that equation and the bank’s own note puts it nearer 2.9 per cent. Electricity was up about 12 per cent for the year – it felt like 20 per cent. Petrol was the largest upward shove in the CPI. Food, in the selected indexes, was nearer 2.5 per cent according to the data – that felt like 20 per cent as well. The morality play shrinks when you look at the pieces. The RBNZ does not drill oil. It does not keep a cool store cold. It does not keep us productive. Those energy costs sit on the farm, the truck, the shop, the lights – and then they are transferred to the packet, the cashier’s till and the invoice. Government should sort what it actually holds a lever on: power, fuel security and waste that does not have to live in the CPI. It can decide how many dollars we waste on climate, UN and Treaty initiatives – but apparently not today, because the supermarkets are the only ones ‘ripping us off’. Watch the pump. Someone sneezes in the Strait of Hormuz and the pump price moves the next day – even when last month’s litres are still in the tank, weeks of supply already paid for. Retail fuel often prices the next cargo, not the tank under your feet. Call that a theory if you work in an office. On the forecourt it still feels like yesterday’s petrol at tomorrow’s panic price. You will wait forever to hear a minister say the word ‘gouging’ about that. Groceries get a review. The petrol pump gets a shrug. Three letters explain the manners: T, A and X. The Crown is on the pump. Bite the supermarket in public. Leave Wellington’s tax take alone, you whiners. Here is the nudge again. You are invited to believe the cashier’s till rose because of a strait and a foreign name. Oil did move. What is left off the slide is the New Zealand decision to shut domestic refining, stop exploration and permits and rely on a ship from the east. The foreign headline made the sneeze louder because we chose not to keep a buffer at home. It is easier to point at a map in some far land than at a NZ refinery that no longer operates. We still have the resources, but investors are too scared to come here. After this week’s announcements, foreign supermarket chains will be chomping at the bit to enter a country that shuts companies down on a whim or a slogan. So much for encouraging another player into the market… I am not disputing that the duopoly needs more competition. What I am suggesting is that there are better ways to get a real result for consumers than socialist tactics, or cutting off your nose to spite your face. The third chapter is the same trick, just another disguise. Let’s face it: under Labour, the RBNZ’s money-printing hangover is still in the prices. Incoming governments have to stand firm on spending and look for productive growth here. There is a list of offences to address before focusing solely on supermarkets. If the Commerce Commission and the grocery commissioner are **not up** to that task, stop paying for the theatre – or give them teeth and a mandate to do the job we expect. Now that is a novel idea, mandate someone to do their job, rather than mandate people out of their jobs. So here we are. Energy was thinned by policy. The price at the pump jumps while the tank is still last month’s fuel. None of that required splitting a private company into ideologically approved pieces. It required saying which costs are inflation and which are a sermon. The politicians are choosing the sermon. Follow the decision. The wallet already has: it is almost empty. The nudge only works one way. Get caught in this fairy tale and we are just digging a deeper hole. The smell is spreading. There must be something stale in the Beehive.