No, not those supermarkets, the one I actually tolerate and feel quite loyal towards.
| But First – Breaking News! |
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| There’s a hint of deja vu on the air. Once again, the Supermarkets Skinning Shoppers Saga moves faster than my publishing schedule. This article was scheduled for July 30th and now here I am rushing to add the latest and publish it today on June 24th. We have to stop meeting like this, supermarkets… The recent probe into the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct has made a few decisions, including making the Voluntary FGCC compulsory for the supermarkets. They found that “… the voluntary code was failing to address the imbalance of bargaining power …” Huh. Imagine that. The foxes were given keys to the henhouse as long as they – well, nothing, really. They had nothing constraining them from doing whatever they wanted in the chook pen. The probe has recommended to actually include some controls that make sense, in a way, with penalties targeting the larger supermarkets over the smaller ones, and include penalties that your journalist finds to be quite satisfactory. (But then I am a bit bloodthirsty when it comes to such extortionate b*stards as these two supermarkets in particular have been. Bring back the ducking chairs I say! Well, okay – maybe not. But the penalties the probe recommends might make some managers quite honest. And I’m all about “Keeping The Bastards Honest…”) The only thing that might present a problem is that with farmers promised fair handling by the supermarkets covered by the new legislation, that smaller supermarkets may find that the Big Two could raise the prices they pay farmers to the point where the smaller ones are completely outbid. But surely the bigger supermarkets wouldn’t crowd out their smaller competition with a temporary flood of unaffordable prices while silently absorb those costs themselves until the competition’s been bankrupted . . . would they? . . . . There’s also a chance that this will form part of the “breaking up” of the big two by the government into separate groups whose profits remain below the $5bn threshold they’ve set. Rather than moderate their behaviour, they may find this an acceptable alternative. I guess stay tuned readers, and I’ll keep up the stories as they come out. |
Now Back To The Article
ALDI is making moves to start making dents in Coles’ and Woolworths’ market duopoly. I don’t care that this could end with Coles and Woolies collapsing and us stuck with a single monopoly consisting of ALDI instead of the “ColesWorth” duopoly. Not that this will happen, but anything that promises to reduce the exploitation we’re experiencing from the “Big” Twocan only be a good thing.
Because I feel that ALDI’s life story has been so different to how Australia’s supermarket sector got to where we are today, and ALDI does seem to care for both their suppliers and their customers a lot more.
I’ve long been a “ColesWorth” basher – they took advantage of their stranglehold duopoly position in Australia to impoverish the farmers and growers and local manufacturers, then rip off their trapped customers to top off their class act, and to this day I can’t find a punishment I’d consider to be severe enough to inflict on their corporate management and redress the wrongs they’ve done. (But see “Breaking News” above! There is light! At the end of the tunnel!)
These two companies have served as shining examples to other corporations, emboldening those in turn to inflict so much financial harm on the populace that I pretty much attribute our current financial situation entirely to the rampant rabid greed and robbery that ColesWorth fostered and nurtured among telecoms, energy, fuel, and even real estate companies. by the lead of their shining examples.
I’m going to say it – this is not a recession. It’s the result of a cold-hearted parasitic corporatocracy interested only in exploitation and growth even if that’s at the expense of their hosts, the consumers. Corporations are just another virus pandemic, and the recession-like effects are symptoms of infection.
Before ColesWorth, corporations tended to adhere to the competitive structures that free market economics predicted they should take place, and then instead they started to get this “If THEY can do that and just fix prices between them and bleed the people dry drop by drop, so can we!” I’m not saying ColesWorth started this race to the bottom, I think it’s been a snowballing effect with many fields edging the lower rung ever lower. But now we need it to stop.
Because of this self-reinforcing ring the loose coalitions of several (petrol station chains / power companies / hardware store chains / power companies and resellers / etc) that had previously competed to offer us the lowest cost for their product became emboldened and held their high-price-ground – and the populace wept for they were suddenly paying almost double for things like their weekend drive. (Yeah, screw Morrison and his “they want to steal your weekend” campaign against EVs, because this greed is God attitude permeated everything.)
I’ve found articles that supported that what the ColesWorth duopoly was doing was criminal, that it was time for us to call them on their greed, and that they were greedy and ruthless. (You may like to know that “ruth” in this context quite literally meant “mercy” in older versions of English.)
In short, and to quote many people, we’ve had it with their shit. They’ve ruined Australia and the Aussie mateship and spirit that we had a mere few decades ago. Time to carve them up into smaller units I think.
Why I’ve Always Liked ALDI
A Brief History Of The Resistance
Back 20 or so years ago I’d already had a gutful of their duopoly. I remember writing post after post about the greed, the dishonesty – the total in-our-faces deceitfulness. I started shopping at IGA (an Aussie chain of supermarkets that presented themselves as local and community-oriented) because they weren’t Coles nor Woolworths, and every dollar I spent elsewhere was a dollar those bastards weren’t getting.
I started using Don Chipp’s 1980 “Keep the bastards honest” slogan because the Australian Democrats seem to be finished with it and aren’t actually keeping the bastards honest any more, so it seemed like a waste of a great phrase and a great concept…
Given that IGA and the several other small operators were fought at every step of the way by the great duopoly, their stores started to vanish – quite literally. Both Coles and Woolworths began some of their worst tactics yet by putting up stores in two-horse towns that had a FoodWorks or IGA or Food Barn, Bi-Lo, Dewson’s, 4Square, Supa Valu and dozens more. They quite literally operated overkill-sized supermarkets at a loss just to put those smaller operators out of business.
In places that had good fruit&veg grocers or good local butchers alongside a smaller supermarket or two, the effect was devastating, and once again, makes ColesWorth responsible for Australians losing access to fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat, devastating the local economies because suddenly they were the only buyers for that produce, and slowly choking farmers and growers.
The resistance died in their thousands. (Stores and presences in their communities, I mean. I don’t think Colesworth drove too many depairing store owners or farmers to suicide, although they drove many to the brink of despair with their piracy.
Oh and then they have the sheer brass balls to blame those same farmers asking for a fair price, for the rise in the costs of their foodstuffs, but the fact remains that if their costs to farmers were too high to absorb they could have taken a small cut to their insane billions-per-year profits and kept prices “down down.”
Instead, at the same time as they claimed that farmers were raising our costs, they were also making obscene and record profits. Without flinching or feeling the slightest bit guilty, they just screwed everyone over on both sides.
And they have a few shots at their customers, too. They claim that an “insane amount” of produce is rejected by Australian shoppers because it isn’t perfect. I can actually tell you why that is, but to do so I want to introduce you to a man who took the food that, according to ColesWorth, customers rejected, and turned it into such a success that he opened seventeen(!!!) “Spud Shed” stores in Western Australia – and people buy those same products that ColesWorth say they reject, at a rate that makes Spud Shed a very successful business.
Tony Galati and his brother Vince are not at all concerned that they’re offering produce that “Australian shoppers reject” because – we aren’t. The Spud Sheds are thriving. And the brothers have taught the bigger supermarkets a lesson, because they each now make the token gesture of selling “rejected” produce. If only they’d also price them more fairly. But just the fact that those supposedly rejected vegetables sell, makes another bald-faced lie they’ve been spreading.
Someone’s full of it here and I don’t think it’s the Spud Shed… Coles and Woolworths are decidedly the lowest of the low, they sling shit wherever they go, they lie and cheat and conspire and break a dozen laws every day they’re in operation, and the call to break oligopolies apart and make sure they never clump together in such huge manure piles again has my full vote.
ALDI To The . . . Rescue?
The Government has mooted anti-monopoly plans that would allow the breaking up of Coles and Woolworths, and that will definitely throw a large wrench in the works. But it should also produce fairer prices for us. There’s also the possibility of just a normal competitive market overthrow of the order of things.
As I said – if ALDI pulls off their plans in full, or the Australian government pulls off their plans so that they lose their control of prices on both ends of their businesses, there’s a chance that ALDI will suddenly be largest supermarket chain in Australia. Should we worry about that? Only if they uncharacteristically abuse that position – and so far it seems to me that they’ve never really overstepped the boundaries here and I don’t think they actually would.
I’ve already noticed ads for ALDI Insurance appearing – I think it’ll be an interesting few months. And maybe after this, we’ll see a few other oligopolies pull their heads in and let prices return to normal on other things such as fuel, electricity, and perhaps even real estate and rentals.
I draw your attention to one method that our predecessors used to end cruel greedy practices, which was the well-known fiery brands and pitchforks. When conditions were made too expensive for the populace, this was certainly a way to remove the greed and corruption. We live in a more enlightened age now, however, and we have recourse to other means.
Write emails and postal mails to your Ministers for the economy, justice, consumer affairs and any other department you can think of. Write them also to the managerial chain, person by person, of your local robber baron supermarket chain and ever so subtly remind them of the smell of smoke and the ring od stee- no! Just make your opinion known and that you will campaign against them as long as they persist in making your life brutish, cruel, and difficult, and explain that you will make it your mission to make their lives similarly miserable.
Fair’s fair.
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