The Paper Bag That Costs More Without Anyone Saying So

There is a particular quietness to the way prices rise in modern retail. No announcement, no fanfare, no moment of public reckoning—just a five-cent difference noticed at the checkout, confirmed by a receipt, and eventually absorbed into the weekly budget without protest. Coles has raised the price of its paper shopping bags from 25 cents to 30 cents, a 20 percent increase that shoppers discovered not through a press release but through their own receipts and the slow accumulation of small, daily costs .

The change was confirmed by Coles in a statement to nine.com.au, with a spokesperson attributing it to “changes in costs such as materials and transport” and noting that the supermarket had “worked to keep these increases as low as possible” . The larger chiller bags have also risen, from $4 to $4.20, while the flat fee for online orders remains at $2 . Woolworths and Aldi paper bags remain at 25 cents, making Coles the outlier among the major chains .

This is not an isolated increase. In May 2026, Coles raised its online paper bag fee from $1.50 to $2, a change communicated only at the final stage of checkout, after customers had already selected their groceries . The pattern suggests a strategy of incremental adjustment rather than transparent pricing—each increase small enough to avoid significant backlash, each one normalized by the passage of time.

The broader economics of supermarket bags are difficult to ignore. QUT retail expert Professor Gary Mortimer estimated that major supermarkets earn approximately $170 million annually from charging for bags after phasing out free single-use plastic options . For a weekly grocery shop of around $240, using eight paper bags at 25 cents each adds $2 per trip—roughly $104 per year . That figure will now rise slightly for Coles shoppers.

The behavioral science behind this acceptance is well documented. Dr. Nadja Dollisson, a finance and marketing expert at Swinburne University, explained that once all major chains adopted the same rule, shoppers had “nowhere else to go,” and a change that initially felt like a shock “quickly settled into ‘just how grocery shopping works’” . The charge was originally meant as a deterrent to encourage reusable bag use, but as Dollisson noted, “25 cents was too weak to override convenience” .

Not all shoppers have accepted the change silently. Some took to social media to express frustration, with one man describing Coles as “cheeky” after noticing the new 30-cent price at his local store . The increase was confirmed at stores in Western Sydney and Potts Point, suggesting a nationwide rollout rather than an isolated error .

The five-cent difference is unlikely to alter anyone’s weekly budget in isolation. But it arrives in a context of rising grocery prices, where small increases accumulate into a cost of living that many households feel more acutely than the headline inflation figures suggest. The bag, once a free convenience, has become a recurring line item—and the price of that line item continues to creep upward.

AI Image Disclaimer: The imagery associated with this article was generated using artificial intelligence for illustrative purposes only and does not depict the actual stores or products described.

Sources: Nine, Daily Mail, Seniors Discount Club, OzBargain