Carrington Clarke

We don't want to go to court again, is the Coles statement.

I mean, it is an interesting question though, right?

Are we going to go down the path where there is a clear guideline from the ACCC saying, if you have a similar situation, the price has to be at 12 weeks using this as the benchmark, and that is it.

Everyone has to play by the same rules.

Is that what consumers want?

Or do you want a softer touch, which is, well, they have to be real discounts and then come up with your own internal guardrails of what that looks like.

Given how high profile these cases have been, maybe we are going to go down a pathway where it is much more clearly defined what you are able to do when it comes to pricing.

And obviously, those people who believe in letting markets decide these things allow the free market to rip or allow individual companies to make that decision later.

when they're thinking about what relationship they want with their customers.

Is that a better outcome?

That's to be debated.

So we have seen an impact on the Coles share price.

I'm looking now, it looks about down 3.8%.

Again, timestamp's important, it's about midday.

We'll see how, as this information is processed, what people make of what the impact is going to be on the profit.

Now, that's a lot less than what we saw with the Commonwealth Bank yesterday.

I mean, its shares got absolutely smashed after it provided an update on its performance.

But it also came the day after the budget.

So the usual disclaimer applies.

It's impossible to know what every single individual buyer and seller was making its decision based on.