‘Ridiculous and confusing!’ Woolworths online shoppers get charged MORE for NOT having plastic bags

STEPHEN JOHNSON
6 August 2019
DAILY MAIL AUSTRALIA

Online customers with Australia’s biggest supermarket chain Woolworths are still slugged more for not having their groceries delivered in plastic bags.

A $2 charge is levied for having items taken to your front door in a crate.

By comparison, customers are charged $1 if their groceries are delivered in plastic bags.

A mother who last week ordered food online was perplexed at the Woolworths policy – a year after it banned single-use plastic bags for environmental reasons.

‘It seems ridiculous that Woolworths charges double the price for not using plastic bags,’ she told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday. ‘I’m so confused.’

This customer Michelle, who declined to have her surname published, contacted Woolworths via Facebook Messenger asking them about this policy.

The supermarket giant’s customer service team, however, gave a confusing response about why the crate service cost more.

‘Hi Michelle, the amount added to your order is reflective of the additional cost of providing our ‘crate to bench’ service,’ they said.

Woolworths then claimed they had reduced the cost of crate delivery.

‘We’re reducing the price because we’ve improved our processes and become more efficient in handling ‘crate to bench’ deliveries,’ it said.

A Woolworths spokesman said the policy was introduced in June 2018, in tandem with the ban on free, single-use plastic bags.

‘With our crate to bench service, orders are packed directly into our delivery crates, and then unpacked onto a customer’s bench by a delivery driver when they arrive,’ he said.

‘The amount for the crate to bench option reflects the additional costs of providing the service.’

He added Woolworths was transparent about its delivery pricing.

Both Woolworths and its main rival Coles last year banned free, single-use plastic bags and replaced them with biodegradable plastic bags that customers are charged 15 cents for at the checkout.

When it came to saving shoppers’ money, their rival Aldi has been given the credit for reducing prices by $2.2billion every year.

The German supermarket giant commissioned business advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers to calculate how much it was saving customers.

It found Aldi, now Australia’s third most popular grocery retailer, had saved Australian shoppers $2.2billion in 2018, as inflation remained at unusually low levels.

Australia’s consumer price index rose by 1.6 per cent during the past financial year.

While the annual increase in the June quarter was greater than the March quarter’s 1.3 per cent, inflation is still well below the Reserve Bank of Australia’s two to three per cent target.