New Zealand’s elderly appear to be stockpiling their sculleries with sharp SMEG stabby things.
And who can blame them?
The generation that has probably benefited the most from modern capitalist doctrine is now facing the sharp-end of it’s callousness.
Other generations consider “Baby Boomers” to have had a pretty easy ride up to this point: Jiving through the groovy 60s, getting free, or at least far cheaper tertiary education, financially thriving in a plentiful secure long-term employment market and cornering a once-affordable real estate market as a result.
Many “Boomers” don’t like seeing their position and perceived privileges being challenged at all and take great exception to it. You only have to utter the words “Capital Gains Tax” and busloads of grey-haired retirees will turn up to National Party, ACT and New Zealand First campaign meetings, frothing at the thought of their “hard earned” financial fortuities going towards financing their government-funded pensions and healthcare.
When Baby Boomers go “boom”, they go boom BIG!
One target Boomers are so often rallied into going “boom” at, because they have been convinced (or conned) by conservatives and capitalist cant commentators, is beneficiaries and how much of a pachyderm-sized drain they are on “the economy” and “hard working Kiwis”.
Only, there’s one big problem with Boomers blaming beneficiaries for New Zealand’s economic ills.
The elephant in that room is pensioners are New Zealand’s biggest bunch of beneficiaries!
As at June 2025 New Zealand Superanuation costs taxpayers far more than any other benefit or welfare type:
NZ Super: $23 Billion
Jobseeker Support and Emergency Benefit: $4.6 Billion
And New Zealand’s Boomers are now discovering that their prefered right-wing political parties don’t care about ANY beneficiaries – Even them!
As New Zealand’s chaotic coalition government continues to deepen and lengthen New Zealand’s cost-of-living crisis some retirees are having to choose between the basics of food and electricity for heating over winter while grocery chains and power companies are making record profits.
But, hey, “Capitalism!”, am I right?!…
When hospitals are simultaneously understaffed AND bursting at the seams with patients waiting to be seen, our politicians are trying to profit from pain and pestilence by pushing healthcare privatization and even cutting in-home care.
So perhaps now wasn’t the best time for one of New Zealand’s grocery duopoly brands to bring back a promotion involving knives.
Foodstuff’s New World supermarket chain has brought back their popular SMEG knife promotion after its previous campaign had demand slicing through promotional stocks like, well, a hot SMEG knife through a $10 block of butter.
*SAFETY NOTE* Do NOT heat SMEG knives, as they are an all-metal construction, so will likely burn your unprotected hands.
The collectable, tiny paper stickers are not too dissimilar in appearance to LSD tabs of the Swinging 60s, just more addictive.
It’s like the “Summer of Love” had a lovechild with “The winter of our discontent“.
Thousands of older New World shoppers have likely been reliving a misspent youth getting their adhesive fix when buying their groceries.
Twenty dollars spent on groceries (that’s two blocks of butter, give or take) will get you one sticker, with bonus stickers given for purchasing particular products.
With between 25 and 40 stickers needed to get a knife, that equates to between $500 and $800 spent to get a “Free” knife.
I’m not sure this is how “Free” is supposed to work…
(It is possible to get knives using a combination of fewer stickers and cash, from 13 stickers and $13 to 20 stickers and $20, but still not “Free”)
Over the past weeks when getting groceries from New World I have seen more and more of the now-pension-aged “Boomer” generation cashing in their stickers for knives.
It would appear a second (checkout) counter-culture revolution may already be quietly under way!
Having been dealt so many cutbacks in their entitlements and what they used to be able to afford, are Boomers about to go “Boom!” and cut back against those wielding the government’s financial filleting knife?
We have already witnessed one political incident in recent weeks of “the knives being out” against members of New Zealand’s government, albeit internally.
While the results were ultimately blunted, it wouldn’t take much to guess the brand of knives, or where they were acquired.
Given National’s pitiful practise of blaming the previous government for all the troubles they themselves created and exacerbated it’s surprising New World’s Labour-red reusable shopping bags now don’t incite nervous ticks in more ways than one from their “united” caucus.
It’s rather appropriate that the Smeg knife promotion ends on Sunday 4 October, just over a month before New Zealand’s 2026 General Election on 7 November.If stocks run out before then, will it be an indication that those undermining the plumpness of pensioners’ purses will be heading for the chopping block?
Will the transformation from “OK, Boomer” to “Et tu, Boomer!” be complete?
You can just about cut the tension with a “Free” knife!
