Picture a Nelson family doing their weekly shop. Trolley full, checkout beeping: $294. A decade ago, that same shop would have cost them $180. RNZ reports households are freezing spending to cope with soaring bills. Here's the number driving that freeze. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

South Island grocery bills hit $15,305 in 2024. That's up from $9,387 in 2014. A 63% jump in ten years. If your wages haven't climbed 63% since 2014, you're eating into something else to pay for bread and milk.

The trajectory tells you everything about why Kiwis have stopped spending. In 2020, before COVID rewired the economy, South Island households were spending $12,509 on groceries. Four years later: $15,305. That's $2,796 more annually. Or $54 more every single week, compounding, relentless, unavoidable.

This isn't about luxuries. You can cancel Netflix. You can skip the holiday. You cannot skip feeding your family. Grocery bills are the expense that won't negotiate. And when that expense climbs $54 a week while interest rates are still elevated and wages are barely moving, something has to give.

The 2024 number is particularly grim because it arrived despite falling inflation. Food price growth slowed. Interest rates started coming down. The cost-of-living crisis was supposedly easing. Yet South Island households still paid $241 more for groceries in 2024 than they did in 2023. The weekly shop went from $290 to $294. Small increment, massive cumulative weight.

What does $15,305 actually mean? It means a South Island household is spending $1,275 a month at the supermarket. More than most people's rent was a decade ago. More than a car payment. More than a lot of families have left after paying the mortgage.

The South Island's grocery burden sits just below Auckland's $15,553, but the regional context matters. Wages are lower outside the main centres. Housing might be cheaper, but groceries aren't. A Timaru household and an Auckland household pay roughly the same for milk, bread, and meat. One earns significantly more.

This is the story behind the spending freeze. It's not about consumer confidence or sentiment. It's about arithmetic. When groceries take an extra $2,800 a year out of your budget, you don't have $2,800 to spend elsewhere. Retailers waiting for spending to bounce back are waiting for money that's already gone. It went to the supermarket.

Fifty years of data, and we've never seen grocery bills climb this fast for this long. The South Island spent $15,305 on food in 2024. In 2014, it was $9,387. The difference is every other purchase a household didn't make this year.