This SA supermarket is cheapest for toiletries, household products

Aug 15, 2023

A price comparison of certain household products and toiletries shows which retailers are cheapest. Picture: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg

Published 6h ago

| Published 6h ago

With grocery prices and general living costs increasing, South Africans need to get smarter about the brands they buy and the shops they buy them.

They also need to look out for specials across supermarkets.

Of course, consumers will always have their favourite supermarkets and product brands – especially when it comes to toiletries and cleaning products, but this has increasingly been overtaken by the need to make their money stretch further each month.

On top of this, people need to take into account fuel costs when deciding where to shop, as well as the quality of the products they buy as, often, a cheaper price does not always equal cost saving.

To give you an idea of how prices differ for a few random household products and toiletries, IOL has drawn up a comparative table of product prices at Checkers, Pick ‘n Pay, Spar, and Shoprite. Attempts were also made to compare product prices at Woolworths but too many of the products listed did not match the brands or qualities being evaluated.

To make the comparisons as balanced as possible, prices were obtained from each of the retailers’ national online shopping portals. This is because prices of some items tend to differ from individually owned franchises. For Spar, the Spar2U app was used.

Of the 16 products included in the random grocery basket, Shoprite was found to be the cheapest for the majority of the items (10). It must be noted, however, that, although loyalty card prices were not used, many of the products are on special at Shoprite. Checkers came out tops for five products prices, Pick ‘n Pay for two, and Spar for five. For some items, more than one retailer carried the cheapest price.

IOL Business