Are you serious TV3? Show us the shopping list! She must be eating export lamb sprinkled with caviar and gold leaf! Is she buying it from the local dairy?

Maybe she has done her conversion wrong. Also comparing stuff here to there doesn’t quite work.

$1800 a fortnight for a family of 5, where are they shopping. This seems to be aweful reporting. I could buy all food for a family of 5 from Moore Wilsons with top quality meat and would not come close to $1,800 a fortnight.

What on Earth are they buying? Don’t just tell us that she’s spending $1800NZ without giving us the evidence that made you come to that conclusion.

Where is this woman shopping in Wellington that requires her to spend $46000 a year on groceries? I take home less than that after taxes and Kiwisaver, live quite comfortably, and still manage to save a decent amount every month. I fail to see how you can make the argument that the cost of living in Wellington exceeds that of London because one woman can’t figure out how to shop sensibly.

So first off, we spend about $1000 a month on groceries for 2 of us. We shop mostly at Moore Wilsons – which is not always cheaper, but we find the quality a lot better, and we can actually often buy in bulk cheaper. I’m most supermarkets buying in bulk is a rip-off and much more expensive than buying smaller pack sizes.

The snooty comment about “export quality lamb” actually makes the point perfectly (though its clearly meant as an insult). WHY should lamb (of which we have a really large supply) be really expensive to buy the decent stuff because its exported. Meaning the crap left over (which is actually just as expensive by the way) is what most Kiwis are meant to eat. Meanwhile friends in Britain buy our best quality lamb cheaper than I can?

And why do people insist that us ex-pats must be buying caviar and top quality champers to wash down our incredibly expensive lamb with? (to go with our posh cars and drivers?) I would suggest that perhaps (and I have no idea to be honest) that Bernadette is simply not feeding her family with cheap nasty white bread, and the most disgusting sausages you have seen in your life which for many people here passes for “meat”. Maybe she is buying Kellogg’s cereal instead of the cheaper nasty Sanitarium crap?

We do not buy cheap food. We never have, and given that we are on a Low Carb style of eating, we cannot fill up on bread, pasta and rice. So we are left buying fresh but good quality produce: meat, vegetables, butter, nuts. These are NOT cheap. And if you  buy in the supermarkets, expect in many cases to pay over the odds, and for the quality to be less than brilliant. And while buying at farmers markets or roadside stores is often thought to be a lot cheaper, I have found that’s not always the case.

So yes, it would be interesting to know what makes up that shopping list, equally I would like to know what some of the others are buying and how they could feed a family of 5 on less than that.

However, all of that ignores the simple fact that we are comparing the cost of shopping in the UK vs the cost of shopping in Wellington. Presumably, Bernadette is buying equivalent items? Basically doing the same shop here as she would in the UK? In which case her comparison IS fair, and is well worth paying attention to if you are planning on migrating to New Zealand.

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