Greg Jericho

uh, almost monopoly powers, really.

The unfortunate thing with, uh, Australia's supermarket sector is it's kind of tough to see how that would work, uh, with splitting up coals and woolies because you'd need someone to actually want to buy them.

and how it would be done would be unclear.

but also the reason why Coles and Woolies dominate is Australia is a kind of a tough place to have a supermarket chain because we're spread out so wide with a pretty low population density.

And so to encourage someone to come in and say, okay, you're going to have to take on Coles and Woolies and their brands.

Yes, you're going to get some of their locations, but...

You now have to take on all the costs of transport and set up those supply chains yourself.

It's a big ask and it's why we haven't had a real influx of international competitors coming in and saying, I'll have a bit of that.

It's one of those cases where you'd like to go back 30 or 40 years and in some ways sort of ensure that Coles and Woolies weren't able to grab such a huge market by, you know, land banking and other things.

yeah it's really crucial and the good thing with this is that we have some pretty recent evidence of what happens you know after the the russia invasion of ukraine and the general opening up after covert really set off a bit of an inflation boom across the world and it was a situation where supermarkets and companies around the world and certainly here in australia took advantage of because

People really don't have any clue of why something is the cost it is.

And this is one of the key things of this trial.

Like, for example, a packet of Tim Tams.

How much does it cost to make?

What is the reasonable price for it?

You don't really know other than sort of reference to what it was last week or maybe what it is in another shop.

Because of that, companies are able to raise prices on things by more than their actual costs are.

And people kind of think, oh, yeah, that damn Strait of Hormuz is raising the price of oil that we know that raises transport costs.

So I guess that's what's going on.

And it's a case of because of that lack of information, opaqueness about what actually is causing prices to go up enables supermarkets certainly to increase their profit margins.