A much-awaited report into Coles and Woolworths has found what many customers have long believed – Australia’s big supermarkets engage in price gouging.

What started as a simple Senate inquiry into grocery prices and supermarket power has delivered a lengthy 195-page-long report spanning supermarket pricing’s impact on customers, food waste, relationships with suppliers, employee wages and conditions, excessive profitability, company mergers and land banking.

The report makes some major recommendations, including giving courts the power to break up anti-competitive businesses, and strengthening the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).

It also recommends making the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct mandatory for supermarket chains. This code governs how they should deal with suppliers. The government’s recent Independent Review of the Food and Grocery Code also recommended making it mandatory for the supermarket giants.

But at this point it’s hard to say what, if anything, the recommendations will mean for everyday Australians and the prices they actually pay.

  • Taleya@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    6 months ago

    Stop fucking around and start getting serious.

    • ban phantom branding
    • band landbanking (if you don’t develop a commercial site within x years you must sell)
    • give the anticompetitive oversight some fucking teeth including the power to allow market share caps and divesture
    • get some goddamn policy in place to protect the growers
    • audit the cunts constantly and consistently until they stop acting like greedy pigboys
    • tavu@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      landbanking

      Major conflict of interest for a big retailer to hold property beyond what they occupy themselves.

      • Taleya@aussie.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        6 months ago

        It’s a common tactic - buy land in an area being developed to lock out the competition.

        Or in developed areas (hands up who remembers what happened to bi-lo at chaddy…)