Situated on Lot 33 in Yarralin, the Yarralin Community Store provides fresh food and vegetables, white goods and other items to community. Since 2024, we’ve engaged Outback Stores Australia to assist with the store’s management and operation.
Opening Hours
Mon – Fri 9 am to 5 pm
Sat 9 am to 12 noon
Take-Away
We now have cooks on-site who are running our take-away. Contact us for catering!
Email: Yar@outbackstores.com.au
Phone: (08) 8975 1074
Fuel is available 24/7 in Yarralin at the pumps – credit card (or a fuel card purchased from the store) is required.
Yarralin Community Store is a registered business name of Kyang-Kyang Aboriginal Corporation. Kyang-Kyang Aboriginal Corporation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Walangeri Ngumpinku Aboriginal Corporation. We work with Outback Stores Australia who provide management services.
A Note on Pricing
While we try and keep prices as low as possible, operating a remote community store often means items can be significantly more expensive than what you’d find in a major city. There are a few key reasons for this, outlined below.
Compare Like for Like
People commonly notice core items such as milk or orange juice can be around $5 per litre fresh ($10 for a 2 litre container). We don’t have access to the major supermarket store brands – who leverage their vast buying power to keep prices low and push their own branded products. That means we can only buy premium brands. When comparing prices, compare brand for brand. EG: Don’t compare Supermarket brand milk, but compare “branded low fat skim milk” with the exact same item of “branded low fat skim milk” at your local supermarket. You’ll find the prices, while still more expensive, are more comparable.
Take Notice of Discounts and Sales
The major supermarkets have what are called “loss leaders“. These are core everyday items which they discount heavily to make you shop there. You might find orange juice is $4 from a major supermarket… but that’s the sale or discount price. You’ll notice the regular price is usually around $8 or more when not on sale. These low prices are designed to make you buy at that supermarket, while they make money from the other things you buy while you’re there. As a small outlet, with limited range, we can’t afford to offer discounts and sales on core items or offer a large range – as these core items make up most of our business.
Market Power
We simply don’t have the market power to purchase products from our suppliers at the same price as the major supermarkets. As they’re making multi-million deals across thousands of stores, they’re able to get very low prices from their suppliers. Sometimes, those prices are so low that the final sale price at the supermarket is cheaper than what we’re actually able to buy the product for direct from our supplier.
Additional Overhead
Ultimately as a remote community store, we simply have higher costs. We have to provide housing for management staff, pay for travel so that staff can get into and out of community (often several thousands of dollars for flights) as well as higher repairs and maintenance costs. Unfortunately, we can’t just call the plumber out for a simple $100 job. A simple $100 job is going to have another $2,000 worth of travel included for the 5 hours and 500+ km the plumber has to drive – just to get to community and return. This doubles if they need to come back with specialist parts later. We try and save costs where we can, which is why sometimes something might be broken for a few months as its more economical to have a plumber come out once. But if something critical fails, we need to spend big to get it fixed.
Low Profit Margins
The major Supermarkets operate with very small profit margins, usually around 2.5%. This means a major store turning over $1M a week in sales, or $52M a year, will make about $1.3M a year in profit. Remote community stores can turnover around $3M a year (about $60k a week). With a margin of 2.5% that equates to only $75k in profit. It doesn’t take a lot to go wrong for that to turn into a loss. Hiring extra staff for training, a bad wet season resulting in having to fly food in via plane, or repair & maintenance bills if something breaks can all eat into that very rapidly. As a result, we need to aim for higher margins. This gives us a stronger buffer to survive when things go wrong (which they often do in our remote environment).
We try our best to keep prices as low as possible but we also need to make sure we have enough funds for all our other costs so that we can run and maintain the store. We recognise that means our prices are more expensive than people can be used to.
Walangeri Ngumpinku Aboriginal Corporation 