Australia’s major supermarkets should face hefty fines if they do not comply with an industry code of conduct when dealing with suppliers, a government-commissioned report said while rejecting calls to give regulators the power to break up the big chains.
“The existing Food and Grocery Code of Conduct is not effective. It contains no penalties for breaches and supermarkets can opt out of important provisions by overriding them in their grocery supply agreements. I firmly recommend the Code be made mandatory,” Emerson said in the report.
Companies should be fined up to A$10 million or 10% of revenue if they do not comply with the code, according to the report. The final report is due in June. Woolworths and Coles booked sales of A$64 billion and A$41 billion in 2023.
The two biggest grocers in Australia ring up two-thirds of the country’s grocery sales between them, prompting calls from growers and opposition leaders to break up the supermarket giants to improve competition and prices.
Probably also worth noting that Woolworths controls 48% of the supermarket spend in New Zealand as well, and recommendations to force both Woolworths and Foodstuffs (who control essentially the rest of the market) to split their wholesale and retail arms into independent companies was met with a luke-warm reaction from the centre-left government of the time, then quietly dropped by the centre-but-increasingly-not-really-right government who took over
Same issue, merger buyouts. e.g. Safeway into Woolies in Aus, Progressive into FAL into Woolies in NZ. (not to mention FS NI was just created 2 years ago via the merger of FS Auckland and FS Wellington, and now is merging with FS SI). Nothing short of stopping merger buyouts creating monopolies in essential services will stop this problem, and I have no confidence it’ll happen anytime soon. The fines they cop will be less than the revenue generated by increasing margin 1%, so it’ll forever be on that edge where you’re just not quite ripped off enough to let yourself and your kids go hungry