“We also allege that in many cases both Woolworths and Coles had already planned to later place the products on a “prices dropped” or “down down” promotion before the price spike, and implemented the temporary price spike for the purpose of establishing a higher “was” price.
It is critical that Australian consumers are able to rely on the accuracy of pricing and discount claims.
It’s almost like we as a society shouldn’t trust corporations to be honest, and should instead expect constant greed and ratfuckery, and opt for implementing continuous, real-time, transparent, and open data capture to mitigate these problems.
We already do this with energy regulators. Why don’t we do it for all big businesses? They can’t claim this to be expensive, because they already price everything digitally; it’d just be about enabling the regulator to view and capture it.
They are trying to blame “inflation”, but at the same time they are reporting record profits.
Greedy capitalists are conflating themselves while lying? Nooo! //S
Isn’t that the same thing though? If inflation is at record high, their equivalent profits in dollars will be up because money is now worth less
Profits have increased as a percentage of revenue (i.e. profit margins have increased).
Profit goes brrrrrr
Let’s start a non profit supermarket chain
A cooperative is one way to start on that: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-10/supermarket-alternative-co-ops-save-money/104078660
Their definition sounds like too much work, would be better to pay someone to do the work
I get the joke, but actually…yes. A co-op doesn’t mean the people actually doing the work don’t get paid. It actually doesn’t even mean not-for-profit, just that the people profiting aren’t shareholders, but people who actually have a direct stake in the business. That can be a customer-owned co-op, supplier-owned, worker-owned, or some combination of those. Those groups would be the ones making any profit, in a for-profit co-op. And in a not-for-profit worker- or supplier-owned co-op, the workers (including the CEO) and suppliers still get paid—they’re just able to be paid more while selling goods for the same price, or paid the same while achieving a lower price, than a non-co-op business would.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. Another reminder to give the big chains the flick where possible.
The smaller guys need to do a better job at providing a good service though, too. Small local grocery stores have had scan & go options for half a decade overseas, something that Woolies only started rolling out last year, and no other store in Australia has, to my knowledge. The big guys also have options like regular self-checkout, checking prices & stock online/in-app, and direct-to-boot ordering. These are all things that smaller guys could reasonably fix, to varying degrees
Much harder for the small guys to fix is the fact that Colesworth are more likely to be a one-stop-shop place. They’re huge, and with that comes a huge range of stock. Supporting your local grocer is fine, but might then mean you have to make a separate trip to a baker and butcher. Given these less-easily-surmountable drawback, it just becomes extra important that they don’t fall behind in things they can control. But they do.
