In this article, Associate Professor Bree Hurst and colleagues Dr Hope Johnson, Professor Carol Richards and Dr Rudi Messner refer to 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 began as a Senate inquiry into grocery prices and supermarket power has resulted in a report that’s close to 200 pages long 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. Although the recommendations put forward are comprehensive, they’re unlikely to result in any short-term change for consumers but the report calls for a dramatic overhaul of current regulatory settings, which will not be an easy or fast process.
Read the full Conversation article here.