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The country's two supermarket giants have taken different approaches to dealing with the rise in GST, which comes into effect tomorrow.
Foodstuffs, which owns New World, Pak'n Save and Four Square, is holding off on charging customers the new GST rate of 15 per cent, with a "GST freeze" until Monday.
However, Progressive Enterprises, which owns Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown, is closing its doors for longer than usual to give staff time to adjust prices, and will open stores on Friday at 10am with the increased prices.
Foodstuffs Auckland general manager retail Rob Chemaly said the company had decided to delay the price rise and was expecting a busy weekend for the stores.
"Weekends are often the only time that people can manage to do their supermarket shopping. As GST is due to go up on Friday, we wanted to give our customers a bit of a breather before we implement the GST rise on all products from Monday, October 4.
"We are freezing GST on thousands of products ... We expect customers will want to use this as a chance to stock up over the weekend."
A spokeswoman for Progressive Enterprises said stores would close at 10 tonight - unless the usual closing time was earlier.
Tomorrow, stores would open later than usual, at 10am, with the new prices.
Items had been "double-ticketed", with the 15 per cent GST price tucked behind current price tags which include the present rate of 12.5 per cent.
She said staff would remove the old price tags before the stores reopened.
