Mentions Woolworths

In any big trial that attracts public interest, a defendant can hope to draw on public sympathy. Except in this case.

In 2024 the social licence of the big supermarkets is utterly broken — their reputations befouled, their brands synonymous with impersonal corporate rapacity. This is an awful time for them to be attempting to mount a defence to a major charge.

[…]

I’m going to share a quote from Chief Justice of the High Court Stephen Gageler, one of Australia’s senior jurists, that ACCC boss Cass-Gottlieb recently highlighted in a speech. It talks about the definition of “unconscionable conduct” and points out that what is unconscionable must depend on society’s values.

“For a court to pronounce conduct unconscionable is for the court to denounce that conduct as offensive to conscience informed by a sense of what is right and proper according to values that can be recognised by the courts to prevail with contemporary Australian society,” she quoted him.

Contemporary Australian society is not interested in giving the supermarkets an easy pass. In this case a tiny fine will not satisfy the public. The customers of Woolworths and Coles include Australia’s most vulnerable people.

It's also worth remembering that supermarket employees include Australia's most vulnerable people.

Andrew Dunlop runs cattle on his property in southern New South Wales and has spent his career working in the red meat industry, including 15 years in Japan.

Last month, he returned to Japan to find Australian cubed beef for sale at $18.35 a kilogram, around $2 to $4 a kilo cheaper than in major Australian supermarkets.

[…]

Mr Dunlop says it's another sign of concentrated supermarket power and increased profit margins from supermarkets.

"The Japanese retail industry is not concentrated like it is here," he said.

"Any individual retailer in Japan probably has at most a 10 per cent share of the market, although there will be some regional differences."

John Gunthorpe, chair of the Australian Cattle Industry Council, said Australian meat was well trimmed and presented without much fat or sinew.

"The prices and the quality of presentation of the meat are far better than anything that we get here in Australia," he said.

Pressed on whether it was a fair comparison to the beef in Australian supermarkets, Mr Gunthorpe said it was.

"It's beef off the same farms," he said.

"The real concern is the level of profit that Coles and Woolies are making in the domestic market relative to the profit that's being made by the Japanese in Tokyo."

Food is no ordinary commodity. It’s both indispensable and a precious, scarce resource. Ultimately, we need to bring food production and distribution under public ownership and control to end this irrationality.

Achieving that end-goal won’t be simple. We can’t simply take over a system as complex as our food system in one fell swoop. Socializing supermarkets, by contrast, would be relatively simple. It’s the obvious place to start.

Most of the popular discourse around food places the burden of change on individual consumers. However lovely local farmers’ markets may be, convincing people to frequent them isn’t going to cut it, especially as wages decline and working hours crawl up. For their part, government regulations can end the worst excesses of the market, but the problems with our food system require more than just regulatory nudges.

Solving these problems will require rational economic planning. In fact, supermarkets already plan our food system. But they do it for the sake of profit maximization rather than the public good and long-term sustainability.

Every year Australians waste about 7.68 million tonnes of food — that's about 312 kilograms per person.

And Australia's supermarket duopoly could be making waste worse, according to peak vegetable grower groups.

"Our biggest customer is the rubbish bin," one vegetable grower recently told the ABC.

They said they didn't want to be identified for fear of retribution from Coles and Woolworths. 

Formed in 2011, REDcycle was a national soft plastics collection and recycling program. It operated across 2,000 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets and some Aldi stores, with customers able to drop off used soft plastics for processing.

Before its collapse in November 2022, the program claimed to collect 5m items a day. Prior to 2018, most of those were sent to China. After that, some were mechanically recycled into road surfacing, bollards, benches and paths in Australia. But a mid-2022 fire at Close the Loop’s Melbourne plant – where soft plastics were turned into an asphalt additive – took away a key recycling pathway. The fire was largely blamed for REDcycle’s suspension along with a “downturn in market demand” exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.

Coles and Woolworths said in April 2023 that REDcycle had been stockpiling soft plastics without their knowledge while the scheme itself claimed it had been holding on to the waste while trying to ride out problems.

The discovery of 11,000 tonnes of stockpiled soft plastic at 44 storage locations across the country led to the establishment of the Soft Plastics Taskforce under the aegis of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and chaired by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Its members – Coles, Woolworths and Aldi – were tasked with ensuring the rubbish would not reach landfill.

In March 2023, the taskforce released a plan titled the roadmap to restart, which detailed a phased restart of soft plastic collections in stores from the end of the year. That deadline was not met. The taskforce has, however, “consolidated and safeguarded” REDcycle’s stockpiles and will run a small-scale soft plastics trial collection in the coming months. Just 120 tonnes have been recycled.

Those who refuse to have their bags checked can be fired, according to the Coles policy which was updated last year but only recently routinely enforced, according to worker representatives. It replaces a previous practice whereby staff bag inspections were only used after a genuine suspicion of theft.

“The reason they’re bag checking is because they know that their own workers are forced to think about stealing because they can’t afford food,” the secretary of the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (Raffwu), Josh Cullinan, said.

“We have these ridiculous situations where workers may have their sanitary items and prescription medication, and they have to show it to their manager.”

A Coles spokesperson said bag check policies were standard across the retail industry.

“While the policy was paused for a short time, it has been at Coles for many years,” the spokesperson said.

Coles and rival Woolworths have enjoyed a period of bumper returns after raising grocery prices at a faster pace than inflation, leading to increased profit margins during a period of financial strain for many households.