Ora Degani is finishing up her weekly shop at the Queen Victoria Market, her shopping trolley laden with bread, fruit, vegetables and fish. “One of the beautiful things of going shopping at a market is you never know what you are going to get,” she says. “We always try to get what’s fresh and what looks the best.
” Degani has been shopping at the Queen Victoria for 40 years and, like many Melburnians, she feels a particular loyalty towards her market of choice. “It’s cheaper and the choice is much greater there than a supermarket,” she says. “In a supermarket you have one orange to choose, here there are so many oranges.
” As the cost-of-living crisis continues to bite, Melbourne’s market traders say they are seeing an increase in new customers joining the regulars. The Sunday Age visited six of Melbourne’s most popular markets over the course of a week: the Queen Victoria Market, South Melbourne Market, Preston Market, Prahran Market, Footscray Market and Dandenong Market. We compared the experience at each – a vibe check, if you will – and looked at prices across stalls to get a taste of the cost of a basket of goods: broccoli, bananas, potatoes, beef mince, a leg of lamb, flathead tails and prawns.
Prices differed markedly between the markets and from stall to stall, but Footscray and Dandenong were the cheapest overall, with bargains including a leg of lamb for $9.99 a kilo and bananas at $1.99 a kilo.
Women wearing hijabs browse the aisles of th.