Coles Accc ruling finds 13 of 14 Down Down tickets misleading
coles accc lost its case on Thursday when Justice Michael O’Bryan ruled Coles misled shoppers with its “Down Down” discount campaign on everyday grocery products. The finding turns a routine supermarket pricing tactic into a legal problem for the chain and a warning for shoppers weighing whether a red-tag discount is real.
13 out of 14 promotional tickets were found to have falsely promoted “discounts,” after Coles showed a new “is” price beside a higher “was” price. O’Bryan said the discounts would not have looked genuine to the average shopper if they had known the “was” prices had been in place for such a short time.
O’Bryan's 13 of 14 finding
245 products sat at one price for a median period of a year before Coles raised them for a median of just 28 days and then cut them to a third price that was more expensive or equal to the first price. That sequence mattered because the supermarket did not tell shoppers on the tickets that the “was” prices had only been used briefly, or that the items had been sold more cheaply before that higher label appeared.
12 sample products were examined in detail at trial, including Rexona deodorant, Arnott’s Shapes, 2-litre bottles of Coca-Cola and Karicare baby formula. The court also looked at 14 pricing tickets, giving the judge a narrow but concrete test of how Coles presented its discounts on shelf labels rather than in a broader advertising campaign.
Coles pricing before the ticket
During the trial, Coles conceded it had already planned and agreed with the supplier on the new “Down Down” price by the time it lifted the product from the original price to the “was” price. O’Bryan said that was done in an “ordinary commercial way,” and that Coles had been meeting requests from suppliers, but he still upheld the ACCC’s case that the promotions were misleading.
The ACCC sued Coles and Woolworths between 2021 and 2023 over promotional programs that it said disguised price increases on hundreds of products. O’Bryan’s judgment in the Coles case came before his decision in the Woolworths trial, heard in Sydney in late April and early May, leaving supermarket discount claims under pressure as the second case moves toward a ruling later this year.
Woolworths case later this year
O’Bryan said the “Down Down” tickets for the sample products would not have been misleading if the products had been sold at the “was” price for a minimum period of 12 weeks. That gives supermarkets a concrete benchmark to think about when they relabel a higher shelf price as a discount, and it leaves Coles with a finding that 13 of 14 tickets crossed the line in the federal court.
