Woolworths & Coles Half-Price Specials: 14 Weeks of Data (2026)

There is a box of Finish dishwasher tablets on the shelf at Coles right now with a “was” price of $58. In 14 weeks of tracking, we watched that product sit at $29 — exactly half price — in 11 of those 14 weeks. So here's the honest question: if something is “half price” almost every single week, is $58 really the price? Or is $29 the price, and $58 a number that exists mainly to make $29 feel like a win?

We wanted to answer questions like that with data instead of vibes. So we tracked every half-price special at both Woolworths and Coles, week after week, from 15 April to 15 July 2026 — around 36,500 discounted listings covering roughly 12,700 unique products. This article is what fell out of the spreadsheet. Some of it will change how you shop.

Finish — the dishwashing brand — was the clearest example in the entire dataset. Across all 14 weeks, a Finish product was half price at both Woolworths and Coles in every single week. Not most weeks. Every week, at both chains. Here are the specific products and how often each one was sitting at half price during our tracking window:

Look at the Ultimate Plus Lemon tablets: half price 11 weeks out of 14 at Coles. If a product spends nearly 80% of its life at $29, then $29 is its price. The $58 “was” figure is functionally a reference point, not a real one. The practical takeaway is blunt: on brands that behave like Finish, buying at full price is simply a mistake — you're paying double for the handful of weeks the special happens to be off.

This was the finding that made us double-check the data. The Mars confectionery family — Mars, Snickers, Bounty, Milky Way and Twix — alternates between the two chains in near-perfect anti-phase. Coles runs them one week; Woolworths runs them the next; then back to Coles. Across all 14 weeks, there was zero same-week overlap. Not one week where both chains had a Mars bar half price at the same time. It ticks back and forth like a metronome.

The practical takeaway is genuinely useful: a Mars or Snickers bar is half price at one of the two chains almost every week of the year — just never both at once. So if you've got a chocolate habit, you basically never need to pay full price. Check whichever chain is “on” this week and buy there.

A similar — if slightly less perfect — alternating shape showed up for Tip Top, Golden crumpets, Milo and Harpic. Once you know to look for it, the metronome is everywhere: big suppliers spreading their discount weeks across both chains so their brand is on special somewhere, all the time.

Here's the headline number. 42 brands were half price at at least one of the two chains in all 14 of 14 weeks. Put another way: for these brands, there was never a week where you had to pay full price — as long as you were willing to walk into whichever chain had the special that week. And it goes deeper: 125 brands were never off-special for more than a single week running.

The 14-out-of-14 club is a who's-who of the middle aisles. It includes household names you probably buy every week without a second thought about timing:

The most useful thing in the whole dataset might be the cadence — the rhythm of how often the same product returns to half price. Because if you know a special is coming back in a fortnight, you don't panic-buy at full price when you run out. You just wait.

It would be easy to end this article as a cynical takedown of supermarket pricing. But the data doesn't support that — and we're not going to pretend it does. On the core question of whether “half price” means what it says, both chains came out clean.

We went looking for the classic trick — quietly bumping the “was” price up so the “half price” looks like a better deal — and we basically didn't find it. With one exception worth naming honestly:

In dollar terms, the biggest single savings in the whole dataset weren't in the confectionery or laundry aisle — they were electric toothbrushes. The Oral-B iO3 was repeatedly discounted from $199 down to $99.50 at both chains — around $100 off in a single hit. Across the window, Oral-B and Braun models were half price 8 of 14 weeks.

This is the question everyone asks: are the two chains secretly running the same specials? Based on 14 weeks of data, the aggregate answer is no. Across the brands stocked at both chains, same-week overlap was almost exactly what you'd expect by random chance — the two promotional calendars are, statistically, independent of each other.

There are exceptions in both directions. A minority of brands do tend to mirror each other, going on special at both chains in the same weeks. And a smaller minority — the Mars family being the standout — deliberately do the opposite, alternating so they're never on special at both at once. But the big picture is two independent discount engines running side by side. That independence is the single best reason to be a member of both loyalty programs and check both before you shop.

We believe in showing our working — and being upfront about what this data can and can't tell you. Here's the fine print, because good research earns trust by owning its limits.