Joel Gibson

It's very significant.

You know, it's been called the case of the century by a former boss of the ACCC.

And really, for the ACCC, this is their grand final and they've won it by 13 plus.

They really have kicked it out of the park.

It was a big call for them to take on two of the biggest retailers in the country on this question of yo-yo discounting and misleading discounting.

They were all in and it would have been very embarrassing for them if they'd lost, but they haven't just won it, they've won it very convincingly.

And I think, I don't know what a party looks like inside the walls of the ACCC, but whatever passes for a party over there is probably what is going on there at the moment.

Yeah, this slogan's been around, I think, for about 15, 16 years at Coles.

During that period, 2022, 2023, which is a period of really high inflation, so prices were going up, suppliers were asking for price increases.

There were 245 examples the ACCC found of products where Coles had put the price up

and then put it down again and call it a down-down discount.

But it had only been at the higher price in some cases for seven days or one month.

And so the question was, if you put the price of something up for as little as a week or a month, and then you drop it to a price that's higher than the original price,

Can you call that a discount?

Is that a genuine discount or is it an illusory discount, as the ACCC called it, or a dodgy discount, as people in the pub might call it?

That was the question in this case.

And it's also the question in the Woolies case.

We could see a record fine here against Woolies and Coles potentially.

We don't know the judgment in the Woolies case yet, but the facts were almost identical.

So I think Woolies knows what's coming their way in the next few weeks when they get their judgment as well.