In a rare case of legal action tied to rising prices, the government sued Woolworths and Coles for what it described as a pattern of deceiving consumers.
The Oreo family pack on sale at one of Australia’s largest grocery store chains seemed to be a pretty good deal, with a discount of 50 Australian cents. Trouble was, the new price was still a full Australian dollar more than what the cookies cost a month earlier.
And on Monday, in a rare case of legal action tied to rising prices, the Australian government sued over what regulators described as a pattern of deception used by Woolworths and Coles, the country’s duopoly of grocery store giants, between 2021 and 2023.
Gina Cass-Gottlieb, chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, issued a blistering report on alleged price and discount manipulation for hundreds of items, from butter to menstrual products and pet food to nicotine patches, all of which had their prices raised for a few days or weeks before going on sale and being part of marketing promotions. Her complaint also cited the Oreo cookies, and Australia’s beloved chocolate Tim Tams.
With all these items, she accused the two companies — ubiquitous behemoths that control 65 percent of the Australian market — of breaking consumer protection laws by “making misleading claims about discounts, when the discounts were, in fact, illusory.”
Even worse, she added: “The false or misleading representations concerned the price of household staples at a time of increasing cost-of-living pressures.”
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