Cheaper shopping ... Retail prices for alcoholic drinks were cheaper in Sydney than Melbourne.
Melbourne's character-filled laneway bars may have the edge over Sydney pubs, but new figures suggest drinkers in the south pay more in a night out.
Retail prices of alcoholic drinks in Sydney were well below those in Melbourne, and often the lowest in Australia in the last quarter, figures from the Bureau of Statistics figures show.
And it is not just at bars, pubs or clubs that Sydneysiders enjoy cheaper shopping. The country's biggest city also undercut Melbourne in 33 of the 51 grocery items included in basket of goods used to compile the consumer price index.
Sydney was the only city where the average price of a slab of beer scraped under $40, at $39.68, while a middy of draught beer was also the cheapest in the country, at $3.16. The same drink in Melbourne cost 30 cents more, while Melburnians paid the second-highest prices in the country for Scotch, at $6.04 a nip, compared with $5.09 in Sydney.
The most expensive cities were Darwin, where beer drinkers paid $45.01 for a slab; Adelaide, where a middy cost $4.08; and Perth, where a nip of Scotch cost $6.06.
The survey - of several retailers in each city - did not include wine or other alcoholic drinks.
Other goods cheaper in Sydney were rice, which was $2.37 a kilo, 66 cents less than in Melbourne, and pork leg, which at $8.03 a kilo was 71 cents cheaper.
The lower prices in NSW come after the state has ditched its tag of economic basket case, to become one of the better performers in the last year. It grew at more than the national average, but unemployment remained equal highest, at 5.9 per cent, limiting the scope for higher retail margins.
The chief executive of the Australian Hotels Association, Bill Healey, said Sydney's RSL and leagues clubs helped keep alcohol prices low. ''NSW has got a well developed club sector which provides a more competitive environment,'' he said.
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