Peter MacDonald
After years of continuous hammering at the checkout, Kiwis keep on carrying on because they have to. Economic Growth Minister Nicola Willis has rolled out her big supermarket plan, an “express lane” to fast track new entrants into the market. On paper, it looks like action. Cut the red tape, make it easier for Aldi, Lidl or Costco to set up shop and supposedly we’ll all enjoy cheaper groceries.
But this isn’t reform. It’s gaslighting.
The duopoly of Foodstuffs and Woolworths isn’t just a planning problem: it’s a structural problem. These two food giants dominate the market, work in lockstep and protect their margins by locking up suppliers, controlling distribution centres and pushing house-brand products. Willis’s “express lane” doesn’t touch that. It simply gives her a talking point while prices continue to soar, with butter up 42 per cent in a year and mince up 15 per cent. Families are being rinsed at the checkout while government ministers chase photo ops.
The poster child for competition, Costco, proves the point. Since opening in West Auckland in 2022, it has been swamped with customers – even forcing local supermarkets to temporarily lower prices. But, three years later, Costco still has just one store. It even secured resource consent in Rolleston back in 2022, yet nothing has happened. If the world’s third largest retailer can’t expand, despite proven demand, then paperwork isn’t the real problem.
The deeper issue is logistics. Foodstuffs operates its own trucking fleet, while Woolworths relies on Linfox for distribution. Both, however, control key distribution centres and the supply chains that feed them. By dominating retail, freight and storage, they’ve built a system that keeps costs high and competitors out. New entrants would have to replicate the entire network from scratch – a near impossible task in a country with a spread-out population and therefore long supply lines.
Rail freight could slash those costs but decades of neglect, combined with the duopoly’s trucking dominance, has left rail on life support. The big two chains have no incentive to switch to cheaper bulk transport, and the government, which owns the rail network and rolling stock, has done nothing to leverage it. Nothing could be more climate friendly or more competitive than using rail for bulk distribution, yet it sits idle while trucks dominate and prices stay high.
And yet, Willis talks with confidence, because she knows the legacy media won’t dig into these realities. They’ll report her announcement at face value, tell Kiwis the Government is ‘finally tackling the duopoly’ and move on to the next headline. In a few months, the hype will have faded, nothing will have changed and most voters will have forgotten. It’s the same cycle we saw with the so called ‘road cone crackdown’, where grand promises turned into more cones, more road closures and more frustration.
This is how governments manage discontent: announce, amplify and let the media do the rest. It doesn’t matter that Aldi and Lidl have already walked away, that Costco is stuck at one store or that trucking costs continue to strangle competition. What matters is the appearance of action.
New Zealanders deserve better than mythical competition and media-fed illusions. If Willis really wanted to fix the problem, she’d tackle the duopoly head on, open up distribution networks, rebuild rail freight to slash delivery costs and force genuine transparency into how supermarkets treat suppliers. That would be a reform worth remembering.
Meanwhile, the trucking lobby that keeps the rail network down and out stays silent in the shadows, hoping no one will notice. The “express lane” is nothing more than a political gimmick: a green light to nowhere.
