From supermarkets to small fridges – the Shonky award ‘winners’ for 2023

Never mind the Academy Awards and the Grammys. Forget about the Logies. Today marks the really important date on the awards calendar – the Shonkys. Consumer advocate CHOICE today announced its annual award ‘winners’ for “the very worst products and services” of the past year.

This year’s Shonky recipients include some well-known names, such as Coles, Woolworths and Kogan. There’s also a particularly alarming inclusion – personal alarms. Not just a particular make of personal alarm, but all of them, everywhere.

How did Coles and Woolworths ‘earn’ Shonkys?

The joint Shonky given to Australia’s two supermarket giants is an unusual one. It was not earned through poor service or products, but rather for being too profitable. That might seem somewhat unfair, given all consumers know that profit is the name of the retail game.

But CHOICE feels that, under current circumstances, Coles and Woolworths have gone too far this year. CHOICE CEO Alan Kirkland explained how. “Coles and Woolworths have each recorded over a billion dollars in profits this year,” he said.

“People are questioning whether that’s justified. In a nationally representative survey CHOICE conducted in September, more than 60 per cent of shoppers said they believe the big two are making a lot of money from the price hikes,” said Mr Kirkland. In contrast, “less than 20 per cent think Coles and Woolworths are doing enough to keep prices low”.

CHOICE believes that retail giants have not only been pocketing oversized profits, but misleading customers while doing so. “While Coles and Woolies have been promoting how they’re supposedly helping with the cost of living, in the background they’ve been banking huge profits,” Mr Kirkland said.

A ‘Shonky’ slogan for Kogan?

Moving from the supermarkets to the online retail world, CHOICE’s Shonkys also took aim at Kogan. The popular online retailer received its gong for what was described as “deceptive website design”. This design effectively ‘tricked’ customers out of $99, none of them realising until well after the event.

The trick involved Kogan preselecting the free shipping option for all customers. In effect, doing so was “sneakily signing them up for a Kogan First membership trial”. The kicker came after the trial ended, Mr Kirkland explained. “When CHOICE conducted a mystery shop of Kogan with 19 shoppers, six accidentally signed up for Kogan First,” he said. “None of them knew how much they had agreed to pay after the trial ended.”

The alarming truth about personal alarms

For many people, alarms are pretty important. They’re just about the last thing you’d want to be labelled as shonky. By definition, a personal alarm should give a sense of security, yet not one of the alarms tested over a period of six years has earned CHOICE’s satisfaction.

CHOICE labs have tested over 40 personal alarms since it began reviewing them in 2017. “But we still can’t recommend a single one,” said Mr Kirkland. “Personal alarms are meant to provide peace of mind for carers wanting to keep their loved ones safe, but we’ve found these alarms often fail to perform their most basic functions.”

Not only but also …

Other products to earn the wrath of CHOICE were RentTech and, bizarrely, an Xbox fridge.

RentTech, a company YourLifeChoices highlighted earlier this year, is a platform requiring “people to hand over unjustifiable amounts of personal data”. Many renters were pressured into using the third-party platform.

The Xbox Mini Fridge falls into the ‘you had one job’ category. It failed to cool items, even as it expended as much energy as a regular full-sized fridge.

So there we have this year’s Shonky winners. If a product or service you were hoping would get a gong missed out, better luck next year.

Have you had a poor experience with any of this year’s Shonky winners? Or do you know of a company that should have received one? Let us know via the comments section below.

Also read: When customer service had a human touch