Joel Gibson

Yeah, there's actually multiple class actions on foot against Coles and Woolworths.

And there was one that was attached to this case.

And they basically parked that until they could determine what the outcome of this case was, whether those discounts were misleading.

And there'll now be a hearing, I gather, in that class action.

And in fact, the law firm running the class action is still calling for registrations on its website.

So it may be worth signing up to that.

I'm not sure what the close-off date is or the precise details of that.

Probably worth having a look, though, if you're a regular shopper at Coles because, yeah, you might be entitled to some of your money back.

Yeah, I think a lot of people when they make complaints to agencies like the ACCC, they think that their complaint just goes into a big black hole and, you know, or gets tossed in the bin and they get a sort of a pro forma response.

But this is actually reassuring for people that in this case, it was actually taken seriously and it has led to pretty much a rewriting of the rules around discounting in Australian retail.

That's what this case represents.

So what happened here was there were some content makers on TikTok who started noticing what they thought were misleading discounts, posting about them, complaining directly to the ACCC.

The ACCC was seeing the kind of volume of these complaints that were coming in and looking at the evidence in them and decided this was something that had legs and that they should pursue.

That led to them bringing this action against Coles and against Woolworths in 2024.

And of course, these things take years.

But here we are a couple of years later.

And this is a massive result for those original complainants and also for the consumer watchdog who cops a lot of crap for being toothless.

But they're sure as hell not toothless today.

This is probably the biggest win they've had in years.

Yeah, ironically, it was the worst example of the lot.