Supermarkets are not high on many Christmas card lists this year, I’d venture to say. It was only last month that CHOICE bestowed ‘Shonky’ awards to Coles and Woolworths. The supermarket behemoths drew CHOICE’s ire for raking in huge profits during a time of dire customer financial difficulty. Now, supermarkets are under fire again, this time for inflating your grocery price through what some might call underhanded tactics.
This time around the spotlight on ‘Big Supermarket’ is being shone by Gerard Brody, a consumer advocate, and chairperson of the Consumers’ Federation of Australia.
Mr Brody has put pen to paper in an article for the Nine Media stable, outlining “dubious” supermarket tactics. Many of these grocery price tricks have been highlighted before by YourLifeChoices, but they’re worth revisiting while they continue.
In fact it’s worth looking at why they do continue, in the face of ongoing consumer dissatisfaction. And this is where the spotlight can be briefly shifted from the supermarkets to the federal government.
Notwithstanding the efforts of CHOICE and other champions of consumer fairness, it seems the government has remained oblivious. As Mr Brody points out, competition regulators worldwide have examined price gouging and competition among supermarkets in the past year.
And while leading authorities in the UK, Canada and New Zealand have sharpened their focus, Australia’s equivalents have done little. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) hasn’t looked at this sector in detail since 2008, Mr Brody says.
I find that somewhat staggering. The ACCC has many sectors to oversee, but surely grocery prices, which affect all Australians, should be a major focus. A 15-year hiatus from a close-up inspection seems most unreasonable.
What grocery price trickery is in play here?
YourLifeChoices has raised many of these grocery price issues before, but they bear reiteration.
So-called ‘shrinkflation’ is one. This is the practice of reducing the size of a product while retaining the price charged for the previous size. As has been previously pointed out, this will sometimes entail retaining the original package size. It’s hard not to read such a manoeuvre as anything but deliberately misleading.
I used to wonder if this practice was simply too widespread to be reined in by the government. As it turns out, though, it appears that I am wrong. The Spanish competition regulator has labelled shrinkflation an “unfair method of competition”. As a result, supermarkets must now inform shoppers clearly about changes in sizes and prices of products. I would love to see this happen here.
Grocery unit pricing is another issue highlighted by Mr Brody. It was in 2009 that the federal government mandated grocery unit pricing. But since then, there has been precious little done to monitor compliance or enforce penalties for breaches.
Mr Brody has pointed out a change in the practice at some supermarkets that I had not consciously noted. He says Aldi has greatly reduced the font size on its paper and new electronic shelf labels. They previously had “well displayed unit prices”, he said.
Sadly the general rule for corporate giants is to maximise profits with whatever tactics they can get away with.
After 15 years of relative inactivity, it seems high time for the ACCC to turn its attention to the big supermarkets in that regard.
Have you noticed a shrinkage in unit price displays? What other tricks have you spotted being used by supermarkets? Let us know via the comments section below.