From time to time Australia's leading supermarkets, Woolworths and Coles, run campaigns where you get stickers, kids’ toys, or other giveaways when you spend more than a certain amount on your shopping. This blog is about Coles "Little Shop," which is quietly enjoying a lot of popularity. Little Shop has well-made miniatures identical to the real sweets, groceries, and daily necessities sold at Coles. They are rather cute and even adults end up wanting to collect them. Little Shop 1 was so popular they have launched Little Shop 2. You get one giveaway for every $30 or more you spend, but they’re in a bag so you can't see what's inside. I get excited about what I’ll find inside every time. Here are some photos of what I actually got when I did my shopping. They really are made to look exactly like the real thing.


Miniature frozen green peas, instant noodles, Vegemite, and a credit card with MasterCard logo
There are 30 miniatures in all and there seem to be Little Shop collectors, so they also sell cases for storing all 30 miniatures. Apparently the hard-to-get miniatures are already being sold at high prices on the internet. I was surprised that one gold shopping cart, said to be a fairly rare item, sells for $5,000 each on the internet. If you did $5,000 worth of shopping at Coles, you'd get 166 miniature giveaways, but I guess you would probably have little chance of getting a gold cart. Collectors can buy a set of all 30 miniatures online, and individual items for those who are missing certain miniatures are sold privately online for $2 to $10 each. The miniature with the yellow lid and label in the photo below is a typically Australian item, "Vegemite." (It’s brown, like chocolate cream, but is a vitamin-rich paste made from fermented vegetables with a salty taste that Aussies eat spread on bread. It’s something ordinary people have been familiar with for a long time in Australia.) I too was delighted when I got this miniature and was amazed to find that miniature Vegemite jars with the label upside down were selling online for $1,000! No matter how rare an item is, isn’t it just a case of the person who made it accidentally putting the sticker on upside down? Are there really people who would want it so much they’d fork out $1,000?



They also sell Little Shop miniature shopping carts, aprons, and toy trucks. These mini size shopping baskets are so cute, aren’t they.


Shopping carts, collector's cases, and mini baskets are available.
But, these very popular miniatures that you just end up wanting to collect, aren’t they made of plastic? Why are they giving away toys made of plastic in plastic bags even though they deliberately stopped giving out plastic bags for free? I can feel the criticisms bubbling up.
Will Little Shop continue with the third and fourth series?