The Federal Court has ruled that Coles used sham discount offers to trick shoppers into believing they were paying less for products, when, in reality, they were paying more. In a landmark win for the competition regulator, Justice Michael O’Bryan found that 13 of the 14 sample products used in the case were sold at misleading discounts in Coles’ “Down Down” promotion because they were not sold at a new, higher price for at least 12 weeks. The case dates to 2024, when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alleged that Coles and Woolworths deliberately misled customers with their discount promotions.

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Greed-o-meter

Fear & Greed Q+A today

On the highs and lows from 20 years of Kogan.com:

 

"We outplayed every retailer in the country at the start of COVID. We grew faster than everyone, we had the most profitable period any online retailer in Australia has ever seen.

 

And then we made the wrong bet on saying, ‘hey, we’re leaving a lot on the table here, people are relying on us, we need to invest much more heavily in inventory’. So we went and stocked up.

 

And then the day after the US election, the vaccine came out, the lockdowns ended, people started going back to shopping centres and to travel, and online sales for the whole industry dipped.

 

So we were stuck with all this inventory, which caused a lot of problems in the business. It was almost existential problems at that time.

 

So we worked through them, focused much more on accelerating our platform businesses — our marketplace, membership programs and subscription services like Kogan Mobile — and now they make up the majority of the business."

News in brief

Xi Jinping and Donald Trump met in Beijing yesterday with the Chinese leader calling on the two countries to be partners, not rivals. In response, Trump described Xi as a great leader and said the relationship between the two superpowers were better than ever before. However, a thorny issue quickly emerged – Taiwan.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor provided his budget-in-reply speech last night, in which he unveiled plans to index tax brackets and link a target for migration to the construction of new housing.

Qantas chief executive Vanessa Hudson is ramping up pressure on Air New Zealand, adding close to 1 million seats on trans-Tasman routes to squeeze the kiwi carrier.

Both BHP and Rio Tinto hit record highs for a third consecutive session, as iron ore prices held above $US110 a tonne, and copper set another new record.

The latest university rankings are out from The Times of the UK and the normal names are at the top. Oxford number one, followed by MIT, Princeton, Cambridge and Harvard. What’s more interesting is Harvard’s faculty committee kicking off a weeklong vote and whether to cap the number of A’s allowed per course.

Fear-o-meter

The Federal Court finding against Coles is one of the highest profile wins for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in recent years.

While the decision was based on a narrow sample of products, it provides a warning to all retailers to not push the boundaries in their claims about discounts.

The regulator argued that the two major supermarket chains tricked shoppers over discounts. And Justice Michael O’Bryan has set the standard for how long a product needs to be at a price, before it can be reduced and considered a discount. That’s 12 weeks.

Just how damaging it is to Coles is unclear. It’s share price was down 2.2 per cent yesterday and the financial penalty is still to come. The biggest damage will come from the public relations response.

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