Remember when this shopper docket was everything?

At the height of shopper docket mania, with petrol prices at their peak, customers would put through multiple purchases at the checkout to maximise their chances of a fuel discount.

But the popularity of the controversial vouchers — which sparked a legal battle between Coles, Woolworths and the competition watchdog — appears to be waning.

Caltex, the underbidder in Woolworths’ $1.8 billion sale of its service stations to BP, noted that shopper dockets appeared to be going out of fashion when it commented on the sale.

Australian Retailers Association executive director Russell Zimmerman agreed, saying shopper dockets “have lost their importance” for “a number of good reasons”.

THE ALDI EFFECT

With discount retailer Aldi muscling in on the big supermarkets’ turf, Mr Zimmerman said, shoppers had something far more compelling than fuel discounts on their minds: cheaper groceries.

“Just talking to family and friends, I’m getting a sense just talking to people generally that shopper dockets are not as important as they used to be,” he said. “People tend to be looking way beyond Coles and Woolworths.”

Why save 4 cents a litre when it means forking out more for your fruit and veg?

CHANGING HABITS

We might have complained about them when they were introduced, but self-service check-outs have changed the way we shop, Mr Zimmerman said.

Gone are the days of the once-a-week, $200 grocery shop; these days, many Australians make last-minute decisions about what to have for dinner, popping in to buy ingredients on the way home from work. This means they often don’t meet the $30 minimum spend to get a discount voucher.

“So often nowadays people go into the supermarket to buy two or three items ... We don’t tend to go out and buy a week’s worth of groceries in one go any longer,” he said.

NO MORE RORTS

The real nail in the coffin for fuel discount vouchers was the public realisation that they were often not saving them much at all, said NRMA spokesman Peter Khoury.

“I think people caught onto the fact that, even with the shopper docket discount, they were still paying more at Woolworths service stations than their competitors — and often those competitors were across the road or around the corner,” Mr Khoury said.

At one stage, motorists were being drawn in by petrol station price boards listing the discounted amount — with fine print specifying that the price was valid only upon presentation of a Coles or Woolworths shopper docket.

Then the ACCC cracked down on the practice, and obtained a ruling forcing the retailers to display the full, pre-discount price.

“And that then made it very clear that sometimes the fuel station down the road was just as cheap, if not cheaper than what Coles and Woolworths were selling it for,” Mr Zimmerman said.

The size of the discount retailers could offer was also curtailed. Back in the shopper docket glory days, he said, you could nab discounts of up to 45 cents a litre at Woolworths and Coles; this is now limited to 4 cents.

BOWSER RELIEF

Another reason why motorists are not as reliant upon discount coupons is that petrol is simply less costly than it used to be.

“I’m not suggesting petrol’s cheap, but I think it’s probably fair to say that petrol, in relation to where it was, is nowhere near as expensive as it used to be,” Mr Zimmerman said.

While you can fill up for as little as $1.14 a litre at the moment, a few years ago the price was as high as $1.60.

THE RISE OF APPS

Finally, technology has rendered the shopper docket truly useless by giving Australians the power to find cheaper fuel at the press of a button.

In NSW, the state government publishes real time petrol price data on its FuelCheck website and app, as do the NRMA and start-ups MotorMouth and GasBuddy.

“It’s become so much easier to buy cheaper petrol,” Mr Khoury said.

“Now that they’ve got real time price data, before they get in the car to fill up people can just check on the app — and what they’ve discovered is that the cheapest petrol is often 10, 15, sometimes 20 cents cheaper than Caltex, Coles and Woolies servos with a discount.”

Even with a 4 cent discount, he said, “you’re still copping a bit of a hit if you fill up there, and the public’s caught onto that. That’s why we campaigned so hard to get real time data available to the community.”