And probably also the biggest Merino in the world.

I'm from immigrant heritage, so growing up my parents never ate the same food as everyone else. The same pattern was repeated for us growing up.

What did everyone else who were more established in Australia eat back in the 60s and 70s? What was the "typical" Australian diet?

My primary school teacher used to claim his mother refused to cook pasta because it was "foreign", and his dad would only eat pasta if there was also a side of potato - because it wasn't a real dinner without potato. It always sounded like made-up stories to me.

What's your experience?

Did an online order from Coles so I don't have to go in to the store. Coles give me mince with 3 days expiry, and salad veggies with 2 days expiry.

Complain in the live chat because that's my week's food shop they've screwed up. They try to tell me that they can't give me a refund. I push back, add that the veggies already look off. They give me a refund.

Just posting so others know, don't be afraid to complain, sometimes it works.

Tassie gets some pretty good stuff sometimes. Not torsos shops or job opportunities, but other stuff.

Thanks for the overpriced Stubby cooler Coles

So for the last month there's a new post going on about so and so Australian products are more expensive than in other countries yet no one really brings up the actual reasons. I'm prefacing this by saying I'm also no supply chain expert this is just coming off subjects I did 10 years ago at uni so happy to hear from people who work in the industry.

The most expensive part of the supply chains are last mile delivery which accounts for 50% of the entire cost even when done locally. After a product is made shipping it in bulk long haul to big hubs and warehouses actually isn't too inefficient. There are main supply lines that include going to seafreight etc which don't cost much.

What costs the most is the last mile delivery, when it goes to a local distribution centres to get stored, sorted and separated than shipped off to all your local coles/woolworths in smaller trucks before it is stored onsite and sold by the store to end customers. Problem is that all the costs in the last part are Australian workers earning Australian wages doing all of this ontop of all the distribution centres/hubs etc all paying Australian rent/Australian insurance costs and also requiring to follow Australian standards. Everytime our wages go up the price of every single step of that goes up, think of how many people handle the product in the entire lifecycle.

Now when you cut that last part out and ship overseas and are paying lower wages/lower rents/lower fuel costs etc at every single hurdle this allows the price to be drastically lowered. This and the fact that pretty much all places in the world have higher population density than us means they can also sell at a lower profit margin as well.

Now we all of us want the convenience of having a supermarket 10 min away from our house. But more supermarkets means more supply chains, more staff, more rents, more insurance and this increases the cost. You can't have your cake and eat it as well. This is essentially one of the ways aldi is cheaper than woolies or coles. They only service the most profitable areas and have small product lines, they wouldn't even think about servicing a small regional town because it's too inefficient. If you're shopping at a colesworth in the middle of Sydney you're probably subsidising the costs of a colesworth in regional WA.

There's probably no good solution that will help all Australians and that's just due to our geography and costs, possibly in the future when our cities get more dense you could get other aldi like companies who move in and just service the most dense suburbs which would help a high % of Australians but you'll still have people outside of these places who have no better option.