Greg Jericho

If something goes up because of, let's say, transport costs, how long do they have to keep that up before they can drop it down to a sale is certainly a legitimate argument.

But I think what we're talking about here is not a case of they were having to lift prices for any reason.

It was really a case because it was over so many items, there was no sort of conformity of these items.

You could say, oh, yeah, they've all gone up because of transport costs or, you know, there was a wage rise in that industry.

It was just, hmm, they all seem to have been able to raise these things for two or three weeks that they'd dropped them.

And...

There really didn't seem to be much justification from the supermarkets in terms of, oh, these were economic increases in costs.

It seemed very much more like a strategy.

Yeah, it's really tough because the ACCC in this instance, for example, is not really arguing about, oh, the prices are too high.

It's really about being deceptive, sort of false and misleading advertising, essentially.

And the problem with the ACCC is most of its powers are linked towards breaking either consumer law, such as laws of advertising, or laws about competition that are colluding.

And what we know is the Colson Woolies, even though they both came up with this very similar marketing strategy... Almost identical.

Yeah, almost identical.

They don't do it by ringing each other up and saying, let's do this.

They just kind of follow each other's lead.

And they know that they can...

collude without actually having to collude.

And that makes it really tough.

If the ACCC loses this, while the government has given them some more powers to look at prices and to, in a sense, force the companies to justify their prices, really, that's more about are they price gouging?

Are they, you know, really taking advantage rather than