Last post I had a little ‘tanty’ over the ‘Select’ epidemic scourging supermarkets owned by Woolies. This time I’m taking aim at the other big supermarket, Coles who keep enticing us to shop with them based on loss leading strategies of super cheap milk and bread. I have three issues with super cheap supermarket branded milk and bread:
Nutritionally questionable
Have you tried this stuff? My kids won’t eat the bread and the milk tastes weird. I mean the quality has to suffer somewhere if that milk or bread is only $1, right? You won’t find any café making a decent cup of coffee who uses this stuff…they know it tastes wrong and once you start heating it, the defects in the milk only get worse. You have to be a moron to buy this stuff. Oops sorry, I think I just offended half the population. Trouble is clearly lots of people do buy it as the strategy is working big time for Coles.
The detrimental impact on our local industries
We might be saving a few dollars but to give us such low prices it’s not just the quality that has to suffer. How many Australian businesses, farms and families are we cannibalizing thanks to ‘down down the prices are down’? Yep so are our farmers, there so down we won’t have them much longer. Instead we’ll have Coles and Woolies super farms and all the little ones will be obliterated. Or maybe no farms at all, perhaps the supermarkets will just start importing our milk and bread. Oh, sorry, I’m behind the times, Coles have already been found guilty of that with it’s Irish bread a year or so ago.
No choice, just an overpriced non-market
Eventually if we stop buying the quality Australian branded stuff, there will be nothing left but rubbish milk and bread. Then those $1 prices will start to climb back up. Why? Because there will be no competitor. I read about similar things happening with Aluminium manufacturing. In Australia, our aluminium industry is under threat because we sell our bauxite ore to China who then flog it back to us as aluminium at super low prices that are subsidised by the Chinese government. The strategy it seems is to obliterate competition, own the market then raise prices when you have the monopoly. A similar thing is at work with our supermarkets.
Sure there are still Aussie farmers that are supplying produce to our big supermarkets. But if you read the below article a friend posted me, often they can be held to ransom by the Big Two.
http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/august/1406815200/malcolm-knox/supermarket-monsters
Get this, in some contracts the farms have to destroy extra produce that is not bought by Coles or Woolies. That’s right; they can’t sell it to anyone else, so if Coles or Woolies don’t buy it, no-one else can either. So the produce goes to landfill. Unbelievable eh? Don’t these companies have a conscience? Don’t they know its Christmas time? Feed the w....!
King Solomon’s summary of human endeavour seems apt:
“I looked again and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun…and I saw that all the labour and all the achievement spring from man’s envy of his neighbour” Ecclesiastes s 4: 1-4
Yep, one upmenship on a grand scale. The supermarkets are just repeating what’s been done a million times before, one man pushing aside another to meet the appetite of his own stomach.
It may seem naive and idealistic, but imagine if there was another way besides a greedy, harmful capitalism? What if there was an unselfish, mutually beneficial capitalism? Capitalism for others good? As I recall, the Swiss reformer, John Calvin, believed so. In re-engineering the city of Geneva he followed the perfect law given by Jesus. What was it?
“Treat another the way you want to be treated”
So he didn’t see it as wrong to make money, as long as your efforts avoided exploiting others and treated them with respect.
Imagine if our supermarkets could do likewise?
It’s easy if you try
They have no power, if we all choose not to buy
Stephen Shearsby is a Christian writer and performer
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