Days after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced it would be taking the supermarket giant to court for alleged price gouging, one Aussie Redditor seems to have caught Woolworths in the act.
Shoppers across Australia let out a sigh of “Finally!” on Monday, when the ACCC declared that Coles and Woolworths would be facing legal action for the price-gouging we’d long suspected was happening.
The ACCC alleged that over a period of 21 months, Coles and Woolworths applied “illusory discounts” to hundreds of products, with common items like TimTams and Strepsils being name-dropped on the list.
@pedestriantv Go get ‘em !!! #coles #woolworths #supermarket #aldi #accc ♬ original sound – PEDESTRIAN.TV
And in the wake of the announcement of some actual consequence to ripping Aussies off, shoppers have taken online to share instances where they seemingly identified the practice happening in real-time.
Over on the cheekiest corner of the internet, the r/Australia subReddit, one shopper shared a photo that appeared to catch Woolworths red-handed.
In the post which received over 4.5K upvotes, the Redditor snapped a product on a Woolies’ shelf where the price labelled on the yellow “Clearance” tag was a whole dollar more than the original price.
“Was $13 but they forgot to remove the old $10 price tag before putting up the clearance tag I guess,” the user wrote.
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Hundreds of other Redditors began roasting Woolworths in the comments for trying to pull the wool over shoppers’ eyes.
“I hope the ACCC do them like last week’s cold chicken dinner,” said one upset customer.
“Really wish we had other options except to shop at the big two,” commented another.
Others also took the opportunity to sarcastically be thankful for the product being “discounted to 110 per cent”.
“Wow a -$1 saving special!!” somebody joked.
So what’s happening here? Let’s take a deep dive into this one specific Woolies product as a case study of the alleged price-gouging.
Cracking the case of the $10 chicken munchies
The item in question was a bag of Ingham’s Chicken Munchies Original 1kg, which can be found here on Woolworths’ website displayed for the same price of $13 a bag.
If we take a sneaky look at the Woolworths’ Price Trend Chrome extension (which I thoroughly recommend you download here if you haven’t got it already), we can see the Ingham’s Munchies have fluctuated between $11 and $13 over the last six months.
The exception is the 72 days from May 1 when the product was dropped down to $10 — which is where the white price tag would have come from.
It was then brought back up to $13 on July 12, and began shifting between $11 and $13 again.
So it’s a simple explanation really. All that happened was that the old ticket listing for the $10 price was mistakenly left up, exposing the old price history.
Which I gotta say, doesn’t look good if Woolies tries to defend its case to the ACCC.
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the grocery stores’ alleged practice of raising prices to then advertise them later at lowered prices was “completely unacceptable” if true.
“This is not the Australian spirit. Customers don’t deserve to be treated as fools by the supermarkets,” said the PM.
Guess we’ll find out how “unAustralian” the supermarket giants have been once the lawsuit begins later this year.
Lead Image: Reddit/Getty
The post Redditor Seemingly Catches Woolworths Red-Handed With ‘Discount’ Tag Higher Than Regular Price appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
