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.
Even if boycotting supermarkets doesn’t force them to change, you are at least helping local markets to survive and improve as an alternative. The only reason those markets still existed for you to turn to is because of the work and patronage of people who were there before you, and now you are also playing your part in keeping them alive for future consumers.