Transcript of AE 1262 - The Goss: Is the Colesworth Duopoly Screwing Over Aussies?

G'day you mob, Pete here! And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news weather locally Down Under here in Australia, or non-locally, overseas, in other parts of the world. Okay.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss. So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time. Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising. And that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode guys. Smack the bird. And let's get into it.

All right, let's talk about Colesworth.

Colesworth!

Yeah. So this article on ABC news again, "How did Coles and Woolworths become so powerful? The story of the big two supermarkets." So this has come up in the news recently where, well, it's been in the news a lot with cost of living rising and, you know, the expenses of all these things going up and up and up and up and these supermarkets making ridiculous profits. And there was a Four Corners thing on it recently. Right?

That was Four Corners being a current affairs TV, the oldest current affairs TV show in Australia.

Is that what it is? Yeah. So it was a, it was doing a story on Coles and Woolworths and the price of their products and everything, and it was interviewing the CEOs of each respective company and..

.. interviewing one of them.

The Woollies guy was such a moron. He just made a complete fool of himself.

And then he walked out.

Yeah, but then he came back and finished it. But yeah, they pretty much got nothing out of him. And then.

And funnily enough..

He retired!

He retired.

Yeah. Pretty much straight away. Yeah.

Within days!

I know. So yeah. The article here, "Australia is the land of the supermarket duopoly."

Yes it is indeed.

Do you want to explain what a 'duopoly' is?

Well a 'duopoly' is an invented word.

I was going to say..

Well, all words are invented. But. Yeah exactly. Monopoly means one organisation controlling everything.

Yeah.

In this case, it's two organisations controlling most things. They. This is Coles and Woolworths.

And they control 65% of..

About 65% of the grocery market in Australia, is controlled by these two huge companies. There are smaller operators in Australia that make up the other 35%. So.

Yeah, and I guess a big part. Yeah. The issue we have here is that it's something like 80% of the market is controlled by three companies. It's Woollies, Coles and Aldi. You know, that has recently gotten to Australia in the last 20 years and has slowly grown and is a German arm that is branch or company. But it's it is one of those things. I feel like there's more and more resentment towards each of these places. I definitely find myself going to Woollies and Coles and just being like, fuck these guys. Like they just, the especially, I had a student who worked in the statistics department for Woolworths. And they do a lot of just analysing data on buyers and their behaviour and then working out how to effectively maximise the amount of money that they can separate from you and your bank account.

Yeah.

By whether it's, you know, putting the eggs at one end of the supermarket and the milk at the other end, or putting the grocery, you know, doing all that sort of manipulation, putting the toilet paper right at the very back of the supermarket every time. So you had to walk past everything. Putting the lollies at the front where the kids can grab them and..

Oh yeah, yeah, product placement is one thing, but that's, that's just sort of, I don't resent that. That's sensible marketing, because if you're going to sell those things, you want to maximise the time people spend in your store.

Yes.

Because the longer they spend there, the more chance there is you're going to walk out with something they didn't intend to buy.

How often are you there? Because you're getting one thing and you leave with a trolley full.

Yeah, exactly. But the, there are some other behaviours that I really find objectionable because with this, whether it be a monopoly or a duopoly or even triopoly an oligopoly, where things are controlled by a small number of organisations that all behave the same way, then effectively it becomes non-competitive. They will always say, Woolworths will always say, 'Oh, we're competing with Coles and Aldi and IGA' and so on. Coles will always say, 'Oh, we're competing with Woolworths.' But they're not, you know, they're competing with them in terms of they need they want to have more market share, but they don't compete by separating themselves. They compete by just being more aggressive in the way they behave. And..

And despite, apart from the colour and the name of the place, if you walk into these places, if you had black and white vision, you wouldn't know where you were. If you were illiterate and colour blind, if you were..

Red, green colour blind. Yeah.

Yeah. You wouldn't know what store you were in.

You know, the big C and the big W everywhere you wouldn't notice. But look, I think there are some. As I say, there are some really, I think immoral behaviours that. They haven't deliberately set out when they created these companies because these companies, Coles and Woolworths are more than 100 years old.

Yeah.

And they've sort of risen through the retail, into supermarket, businesses in Australia.

Yeah.

Over a long period of time. But it sort of become an inevitable thing now where once you get that big, it's the only industry that I know of where the middle man is the richest.

Yeah.

That the, you've got farmers who are getting completely squeezed on things of it. So a particular fruit farmer, it doesn't matter. Pick one. It doesn't matter. An apple farmer somewhere is, probably cost him $20,000 to produce a crop of apples that will go in a week to a supermarket. He'll expect to get 2 to 3 times that price in order to be profitable. And the supermarkets just say, I'll give you $5,000. Take it or leave it.

Did you watch the Four Corners thing?

No, I didn't.

Because they pretty much gave that example, of a cherry farmer. He was pretty much the only one who was willing to come out and say anything because, again, he didn't want to jeopardise- the others, don't want to jeopardise their relationships with the stores, which is part of it. Right? They're not allowed to. Oh, anyone can speak freely.

Yeah.

They just may not work for us afterwards, you know. But he, he created a, I think he had a crop of cherries for the year, go to Woollies, and it was going to be worth something like 90 grand.

90,000. Yeah.

And then he ended up getting five..

5,800.

Yeah.

And it was because..

And because they picked out a handful and said it wasn't up to their standards.

Oh no.

And it's like anyone can do that. This is like when China says that they found, you know, insects in our crayfish or whatever.

Yeah.

And they're just like, yep. So we're just putting everything on hold. You can't come..

One dead fly.

Yeah. It seems that's part of it. And that. Yeah, they seem to be just completely screwing over farmers.

Yeah. And not just farmers, but other suppliers.

Yeah.

So the other one I've got, there's eight things that this article goes.

Yeah, go for it.

Number two was demanding money to accept price increases.

Yeah.

So a provider says 'In order for me to make a profit, I have to get more money from you. Mr. Coles or miss Mrs. Woolworths?' and I say, 'Fine, we'll increase your prices, but you're going to have to pay for it. You're going to have to give us money up front for us to increase the prices.'.

What would their justification for that be? Would they would that be..

That's their justification!

But from their point of view, is that their fear of not moving as much product?

They say it's for promotion,

Right.

They're saying, you know, we'll promote your product more and to, you know, account for it. And that's, that's the third part of it, is they charge providers to advertise. So when Coles puts an ad out saying, hey, we've got, you know, specials on bananas this week, the banana providers are expected to pay money to have that ad go out.

And in those magazines, right.

And the magazines, you pay tens of thousands of dollars to have your, you know, you'll notice that they never put Coca Cola in there. Because Coca Cola would go and tell them where to stick their advertising.

And Coca Cola is probably bringing in a load of their..

And Coca Cola brings in their customers. And but you know the small, you're a small pasta provider and you want to get on the shelves. Not only do you have to pay to be put on the shelves, you have to put your own people in the shop to stack the shelves.

Yeah.

You've got to pay more money if you want them in the middle shelves, rather than the top shelf or the bottom shelf, all that. So it's this.

And if you have them at the end of either aisle or whatever, you've got to pay through the nose..

I know, and that's and that's all just this completely unreasonable behaviour because you look at and say, well, if a supermarket was operating as an independent business. They would be going out and looking for the best products that they could sell at the best prices that they could make a profit at, and they would be either doing better advertising or reducing prices or whatever to compete, but they don't. They just push everything back to the providers.

And I guess that's part of the issue here, is the lack of competition.

Yeah. And that's the other thing. They match pricing. They price match all the time. It's the same as fuel. You know, the you know, if you watch the price of fuel fluctuating, which again that's a completely different story. We'll get on to that rant and another story sometime. But fuel prices go up and down all over the place, but it's almost always the same. Within hours, it'll be the same in all the local places with different brands and so on. And the supermarkets are the same things. Yeah, yeah. There will be some things that are always on special. There will be some things that go, 'Oh, they put their price of bananas up by $0.20 a kilo. Ours will go up by $0.20 a kilo.'

And that's, what..

We'll leave it below us so that we can get people to come in and buy bananas.

Why? Yeah, I guess that thing is, too, the cynic in me, says they probably tested whether or not that works. And they go with the thing that that works, which is, you know, maximises profit for them. And lowering the cost of bananas probably isn't really something that gets many people in. So yeah, it's annoying, but I think the..

The next one is, you know, the blaming inflation.

Well, that's been constant in the news.

I know. Yeah. 'Oh, look we've got inflation in this country. So our prices are going up.' And you know well your prices are going up at double the rate of inflation. And you're causing the inflation by putting your prices up!

Yeah.

Yeah. And so..

Well, there were a few of those where you're like, how did- like I watched I think it was the other day. I think I sent you images of Coke. I just noticed it. I don't really buy Coke, I buy Pepsi, I'm a Pepsi guy, okay? But they had increased the price. This is the thing that shits me, right? These sorts of practices. And as someone who obviously sells things and markets things and know knows how all this shit works, it just I'm so sort of cynical about it. But they, I think they put up, like a 30 pack of Coke from like 20 something dollars, and they just increased it to 40 something overnight, and you're like, okay, so 100% increase.

And then they do the whole 'Now it's discounted discounted by 40%.' Back to what the- so they expect the discounted to what their original full price was. And they no longer discount down to what the discount was because they would have taken off 20% previously. And they do that across the place. And then they always just have the whole 'everyday special' or whatever. But they use the stickers that make it look like things are on special, but every time you lift them, it's actually just the same price as it always is. Shit like that makes me just mad. I mean, I understand that's the game.

Yeah, that's marketing.

As in how does- but still how does something like Coke, which I'm sure they're not paying very much for at all, go to more than $1.50 a can? Up from, you know, what was previously less than a dollar and discounted down quite often to somewhere like $0.60, $0.70? Yeah. It just feels like..

I know it's crazy.

It's annoying, too, they get you into a position where you're going there all the time and you're only looking to buy specials. So they just do one week on, one week off, one week on. And it, it does. It leaves for me this sour taste in my mouth when I want something and I go in and it's full price because I'm like, fuck you, I'm not. I'm an idiot if I actually buy it for double the price when I know..

Next week it'll be half that!

It's going to be half that, and I'll feel like a moron, especially if it's something that lasts a significant amount of time.

Well, particularly with particularly with something like Coke, I'm sure, soft drinks, Coke and Pepsi and those sort of things are loss leaders. They're sold at a loss. Every time they go on special, they're sold at a loss.

Yeah.

But they know people are going to come in and buy them.

But that, but that's like..

So once they've got you in, you buy the bananas. You buy the..

It's like Apco, right. The petrol station having the cheapest fuel every single time. Probably because they're selling at cost or below, because they have a huge supermarket inside where you can buy loads of exorbitantly expensive.

It's the only way they make their money.

Exactly.

Yeah. And look, the other part of that sort of blaming inflation bit, which wasn't mentioned in this article. And that's the short term inflation prices because of scarcity. For about a year ago that there was a, because of the floods in east, the east coast of Australia, the potatoes were, had become really scarce. And funnily enough, you could still buy potatoes if you went to the vegetable section. But things like chips or, you know, fries, you know, frozen chips and stuff that you would buy doubled in price overnight.

Yeah.

And they have never gone back down.

It's still like $6.

The excuse was the excuse was, 'Oh potatoes are really rare.' Well I don't care if potatoes are rare. Why do you have to charge me more to have them? It doesn't cost you any more to produce your product. I understand if they're, if the increase in cost is going back to the supplier because they still have the same expenses, they can't produce as many potatoes, blah, blah, blah. But that's all changed. And the price is still exactly the same as what it was.

Or if you had the suppliers over a barrel where, they've got you over a barrel rather, right.

Of course they should!

So you got a limited number..

.. you're gonna pay me more for it.

Exactly. But as if that's the case when Woollies and Coles seem to be the ones that are have their hand around the neck of all of these suppliers and are only just letting them breathe. Yeah?

Yeah. Yeah. So there's a whole bunch of those things that supermarkets. And look, I go to supermarkets every day.

Yeah. And that's part of the resentfulness too, because you've got no other options. Where I could go try and find Barwon Heads, IGA and that's it.

I could go to IGA, I can go to Aldi. Yeah, yeah, I'd have to travel an extra 100m to go to Aldi rather than Woolworths.

But they wouldn't have the products you used.

But they wouldn't have the products that I normally get. And it's just habit. But I don't blame supermarket companies for doing this, because in the end, they don't owe humanity anything. They're a company that only owes their shareholders a profit. What I blame is our government for not stepping in and saying these practices are immoral. If you want to get a license to operate in our country, you are going to have to behave yourselves and set limits on those things. Justifiable prices is the only way to go. So I don't care if you want to charge me $6 to buy 160 gram pack of chips.

Yeah.

That's fine.

Show me where the money's going. Yeah.

Show me why it costs me $6..

.. to the profits.

Yeah. And if I accept that 50% of it goes to profit, that's fine. But what I don't want to be is 10% of it goes to the potato farmer. 20% of it goes into the people who are manufacturing the bags and sticking them in there and labelling them, and then everything else goes to the supermarket. And if that's the case I'll accept it. But then when the price doubles tomorrow, I want to know that the supermarket, the supermarket is not getting any more, that the the farmers are getting more. But you know, so I mean, that's just one example, but I think they're justifiable pricing, is really the thing and it's non-competitive. Every other industry that we have, every other retail industry..

A whole bunch of other issues though, right. Like with the energy supplies with Qantas and the..

Oh yeah.

The airlines, there's a whole bunch of these with Optus and Telstra, you know, there's a whole bunch where we have like several maximum of the big contenders that take everything and you'll have other countries that it's just a completely different story like the US and the UK. But I think a big problem with us, especially with the supermarkets, is that they've gotten to a certain size. They kept buying, buying, buying from this article. They were saying they throughout the, after the 60s, right. They just, Coles and Woolworths just started acquiring all of these other chains of supermarkets and shops.

And they buy land from developers.

Yeah.

That's the other thing is..

Preventing others coming in.

Yeah. So that when a new development, suburban development goes in somewhere, Coles and Woolworths will go and buy land from those developers.

Even if they're not going to build on it, right?

Even if they're not going to build on it, but they will then control who can build on it and who can sell it.

And the example was Kaufland, which is another German chain that backed out of opening stores in Australia. I think they had like a $500 million capital budget here, but they only managed to find about 20 sites before they decided to pull the plug. So to cancel things. And that's because the sites had already been tied up by Coles and Woolworths, which had a huge land, banking or purchase land and huge property operations. So that yeah, you wonder how much that, I don't know what, if that's like a grey area where it's like, no, we're just buying the land. But if you could prove that they're intentionally doing it in order to..

It's anti-competitive.

Yeah. Competition.

And that's what the ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in Australia is about, is determining whether or not if what they are doing is fair from a commercial point of view. But is it anti-competitive?

Yeah.

Are they are they doing things to prevent others coming into the market or doing things to make sure that their profits continue unreasonably?

Yeah.

And nobody can nobody can complain about a public company or a private company wanting to increase their profits. But if they're doing it on a in a way that is anti-competitive and it becomes monopolistic that there is no alternative, then the government through the ACCC should be saying, no, cut it out.

It's so, it's so like, it's so sort of, how would you describe it? Just seeing these CEOs just makes you. It just makes you feel like they're handing you a bag of shit and telling you it's cake, right? Like it's, you just seem to get this really bad taste in your mouth every time you see them open their mouth. It's like politicians.

But what can they tell you?

Yeah, it is one of those, I guess I'm leading to. Do you think it's possible to actually be a CEO of a company like this and have really good principles and morals and ethics, or do you think that you just wouldn't be able to stay there very long because people would get rid of you, or the business would just tank because you wouldn't be able to to compete without unfairly, you know, playing the game behind the scenes.

Yeah. It is interesting because I think it's as I say, you're only if you're a CEO, you're only responsible to two groups of people. The board of the company. And the board of the company only cares about profits to shareholders. And so profit is king. You don't, you don't get. I'm sure, not sure. I would expect that there would not be one CEO of a major corporation in Australia whose bonuses are based on being environmentally sound policies, or giving money to, or supporting low socioeconomic groups in the communities that they operate in.

It's all based on how much money they..

Based on your, you'll get a $10 million bonus this year if our share price goes up by 5% and our profit goes up by 10%, the end, you know, there will be almost none. None. There are some socially, at least socially. Not necessarily environmentally, but some socially conscious organisations, large corporations. IGA is a is a good example, although IGA is not a corporation in the same sense because each shop franchise store is a franchise, so it's owned and managed independently, with a branded name on it. But IGA gives back to the local communities. Bendigo Bank is a good one of you know, it's a probably the fifth or sixth biggest bank in Australia now. But they have the principle of we will put a branch in a community and we will turn some of our local profits back into that community. You know, we'll support local community organisations like sporting clubs..

You wonder if it's related to as well to, whether or not the original founder of the business is still there, because you would think that a lot of people who start businesses do start with the right ideas.

Oh, I'm sure they do.

And it's at a certain size. But once it gets to a certain threshold and or it's passed on to the next generation who didn't have that sort of emotional connection to it, or they've sold it off, or they've hired someone else to run the thing..

At that point, they become public companies.

.. making profit, and that's all that mattered. Yeah.

Yeah. And look, there are some, I think sometimes those individuals that start up these companies that become very big and they make billions of dollars for the person. Or people who started the company, they then go public. So the person is now no longer the founder and owner of the company. They're the CEO of a public company. Those people probably behave in a socially and environmentally friendly way themselves and probably do some very good things with their money, but that doesn't mean that the companies are operating in a way.

That's weird, isn't it? You kind of. You imagine that people who are the CEOs of companies like Coke and Marlborough, right? Like cigarette companies. You would think that if you were to just meet them in the street, they would probably be an agreeable, nice person that you.

And they're probably giving hundreds of millions of dollars to charity.

Yeah, but at the same time..

.. setting up foundations and things. But their companies are probably making that money in a less than socially responsible way.

Well, this is the same with like Elon Musk and Twitter or X, and Zuckerberg with Facebook..

.. started on Elon Musk.

I know, and just thinking these guys I just, I just do not get why. I can understand why Elon Musk is still doing what he's doing because of the ego and everything. But I know..

He wants to go to Mars.

Yeah, but he's clueless with that. But with Zuckerberg, you're sort of like, dude, why haven't you just sold and tapped out? Like this is, you're clearly not, a charismatic kind of, front of the, you know, you're not Steve Jobs. You're not, you know, this guy who, you seem to never be in the media, really? Unless you're saying sorry to people at Congress. Yeah, it's sort of like, just tap out and do MMA. Like. Like that's what you want. Just you're worth like $100 billion.

Buy an island in the Bahamas?

Yeah. Why are you still there? Surely you get to that point and you would just be like. And two, if you did really care about other people. And, you know, he says he wants to donate 99% of his wealth or whatever. It's like, why are you still attached to this company? Just bail, take your money, and then just spend the rest of your life doing good things for others, like just..

Ego defeats sense in many cases.

I guess it's just that not being able to hand over your baby. But yeah, I don't know. It blows my mind. Anyway, I guess to finish this one up, how have you noticed supermarkets changed since you were a kid? You were born in 57.

Well, there were no such things as supermarkets when I was a kid. I was born in 1957. I think the first, what we would call a supermarket probably hit in Melbourne, where I grew up in the late 60s, early 1970s. We had grocers shops, which you would go and buy packaged goods at. We had the green grocery, which was the fruit and vegetables. And the butcher, and all of those things were separate. Supermarket was the idea of the one stop shop where you, they would have their own fruit and vegetables and meat and, you know, milk and ice cream and whatever else you wanted. As well as the standard packaged goods sort of stuff.

Which was obviously really convenient in terms of time and travel.

And, you know, hardware stores, you can you walk down the barbecue and electricals component of a, you know, aisle in a supermarket these days. And that's half of what a hardware store would have sold. You know, you want to go and buy batteries for something. When I was a kid, you went to the hardware store or the pharmacy.

You guys had batteries?

Yeah. Well, yeah. Exactly, exactly. Now they're just in the supermarket shelves. So that whole idea of a supermarket really didn't exist when I was a child. And so it is evolved.

Do you think the better or worse? Because when you talk about your childhood and having this sort of community and, you know, it seems like you had a very rosy kind of world that you came from, like the way in which you talk about it. Your mum used to not have to work. She would just go to the shops and chat with the, you know, newer neighbours. The kids could play out in the street. She'd go out and walk around.

Yeah. And when, and you're talking about mum not working.

Yeah.

When I was a child, it was about- well, the 60s was the sort of human rights decade, if you like. Women's rights. And in America, you know, black rights. Race rights were, that was the era of change for that. But up until certainly when I was a very young child, it wasn't that my mother didn't work, she couldn't work. Because if, as soon as you got married, a woman, as soon as you got married, unless you were already in a profession like a nurse or a teacher or something.

Yeah.

If you worked for a company, it was standard company policy that as soon as you were married, you stopped work because you were taking up a man's job.

But the context there would be that you've had all these people come back from World War Two, right. Within that last decade or so. And that was seen as like there was a depression and there weren't enough jobs going around.

Oh yeah, yeah. And look, the cost of living was such that a single wage was enough to raise a family on. For most people.

That shit still blows my mind.

That's not for all people. Like, I could probably raise our entire family on just my wage if we move back to Brazil and we'd be pretty comfortable. But only because I'm effectively running my business in a different market, right. Like. Yeah,

Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, it was, you know, the world was different and yeah, it was- 'rosey' is probably the right word, because when you're a kid, you don't. Your experience is your world.

Yeah.

You don't have any idea of alternatives to that.

Back in the Stone age, it was so much better!

Exactly. So you make the most of what you've got. Yeah. We didn't have a lot, my, you know, we were sort of middle class in a sense that, you know, we had a house on a quarter acre block in a suburb in Melbourne.

Which, ironically, if you were to live there now..

I would want you to buy it.

You would be considered incredibly rich.

Yeah, I couldn't afford to buy it. But, and yeah, it was a great suburb to grow up in and live in. And I'm sure we've talked about growing up in Beaumaris before.

Yep.

But it was, it was just a different lifestyle from what you grew up in. And that's different from what your kids are growing up in.

Well, I just, I guess I kind of see the whole in my mind. I imagine your mum going to the shops, knowing the name of the butcher or the name of the grocer.

Yeah, absolutely. We, I knew them when I was a kid. You'd walk down the go and the butcher would go. 'Hey, Ian, how're you going?' And, you know, the chemist, you'd walk in and go, oh, at the age of ten. Oh. Hi, Ian. What would you like today? And I knew his name. And, you know, I knew the people who were working at the bank, and the supermarket, and and our little strip mall, for want of a better term. The strip shops, one little street in Beaumaris, where we went shopping most of the time, had almost everything that you would need.

Yeah.

But they're all independent shops. And what a supermarket did. Ignoring the service type things like banks and a hairdresser and stuff. What the supermarket did was say, we can be all of those shops in one place.

But it's funny because it's sort of become soulless to some degree, right? It feels like we've sold our souls for convenience and saving time, because we have that sort of epidemic of depression now in today's world, because we're all so isolated and lonely, because we don't have those sort of forced interactions, that it sounds like your mum and you and..

Yeah,

.. you know, previous generations had.

But we also have the one thing that supermarkets have done is, on one hand they have allowed us much more choice in products.

Yeah.

Because our little grocer's store, at home, when I was a kid. One brand of flour, one brand of sugar. One brand of this, one brand of that. Now in a supermarket, you'll have ten brands of, you know, similar sort of things that you can choose from. But at the same time, I could walk into the butcher shop and say 'Can I have six lamb chops cut off the end of that thing over there.' And the butcher would say, 'All right, I'll cut them, give me a few minutes.' And he'd say, he would just. There was very little on the, you know, in the window or on the thing. Some of it was. But he would go and cut them up for you. You could walk in there and say, Look, I want a sirloin steak and can I have it cut 1.5in thick and you can choose the best one possible, and they'll give you that sort of person to person service. You go to the greengrocers, the fruit and vegetable shop, and you'd walk in and they'd go, Oh, he was Italian, so 'Oh, Ian! What would you like?' 'I want some tomatoes.' 'Here I give you my best ones.' And he would go and take a paper bag and he would hand pick the best tomatoes for you, telling you they were the best ones, of course.

They're always the best.

Of course. Now you've got to go and pick the tomatoes yourself from the store.

Wow. And it's getting to the point where you're serving yourself.

You're serving yourself.

You're doing all of that, right?

What do you want me to do, stack the shelves as well, you know?

Well, they'll get to that point. I just wish they offered a discount. You get a 1% discount or something every time you self-serve. But again, they would have probably run that and worked out. Of course, they know people will do it..

Well, the discount, the discount they've accounted for is theft.

Yeah.

Yeah, they've accounted for the fact that now people can walk through and check themselves out of a supermarket, that they're going, some people are just going to walk straight out with whatever they've got.

Well, the thing..

Not way the big thing..

The thing that gets me the most..

.. leave the box of coke in..

Now that they've recently installed those cameras that are actually above your head, literally above your head, looking down at what you're doing. And so if you do have any problems- the other day, I had I think I bought something at the chemist and I left it in the basket and the basket was on the side.

Yeah.

And so the camera saw that I still had a product that was needing to be scanned, but didn't realise it was from the chemist. And so when I finished and wanted to pay, it wouldn't let me and said, you know, assistance required or whatever. And the guy came over and it showed a video of everything that I'd been doing. And I'm like, I hate the fact that every time I go to a self-serve one, I'm treated like I'm already a thief.

Yeah!

It just shits me.

And the fact is that they they accounted for that and then decided, Oh, we don't have to lose that. We now have technology that will cope with this. And you know, the fact that you can you can't actually pay, that- yeah, there was an article in, I read a couple of weeks ago where a guy was, you know, did that. Well, you can't pay. And he said, Fine, I'm not going to. And he just walked out.

Yeah.

Well, this stuff, and they had the security chasing him down and said 'I did nothing wrong.'.

Yeah.

You know, you refused to take my money.

Yeah.

Now, of course he was breaking the law. He was stealing things. But it was he had clearly just had enough. You know..

Well, I guess, to that point, you sort of just like, 'God, guys, how much of this do I need to do?' And then, you know, you have your little flybys or your little Woollies points or whatever that gives you point 5% off every time you spend two grand.

Yeah.

You're kind of like, 'Really?' Like and you would have just well..

Now they have, but now they have, you know, in the case of Woolworths, Coles may have the same thing..

.. download the app and super charge it!

Yeah. But you can, if you want to get bigger discounts, join the club. So you join the Woolworths club, not just have the little card fee you pay, you pay money to get a discount.

Yeah.

And what you're doing in effect is you're just paying money for them to market more to you.

Uh huh. Give us your email! Yeah..

Well, I've already got..

.. it's Prime, right?

They've already got it. But you know..

Remember Amazon Prime, I noticed recently I'm like, they're taking like $20 out of my account every single month. And then I realised, Oh fuck, I've signed up because I kept thinking it was the Prime TV network thing. No, they're separate. You pay two different thing. Prime, the mailing one where you get free postage effectively.

Same thing.

No, I've signed up separately and I had both.

We've got both.

But yeah, but I had to go and cancel them separately in different places.

Of course, they make it as hard as possible to.

Oh, man, it was a nightmare. I was trying to sort it out with mum. Mum's like, I know how to do it. And she was trying to show me how to cancel it and couldn't find it. Yeah. And then two days later she's like, 'I found it!' I was like, 'You bastards.'

I know.

But yeah, they're like, the point I'm trying to make is that they have that. I'll just pay a certain fee and you'll get, you know, benefits. That and I realised I wasn't using them. So I'm just. And my wife has it. So I'm just like, will you buy it.

Yeah. Well that's what, that's what. That's why everything that gets bought on Amazon in our house..

Is through Jo.

No, it's through me.

Okay.

Because I've got prime. So Jo gets free postage, so I go, I get a thing, ping! You've got mail! And I go down to the post office because we got a P O Box and there's a parcel for you and 'I'll do it.' 'It's addressed to me.' And 'I didn't order anything', so, and it's a jigsaw puzzle or whatever.

Yeah. Supermarkets.

Anything else to add?

Not much.

Do you reckon it's going to change?

No. I'm just cynical, because yeah, we're dealing with between the two of them. They're probably. It's probably close to half $1 trillion in business.

Who's going to suddenly come in with that kind of equity?

If the government is going to step in and go, no, they'll fight it.

Yeah. So..

Or they'll agree to it!

Put your money..

Do what they like!

Put your money in stocks for Woollies and Coles. Huh? Yeah, yeah. The cheek!

And Westfield.

All right. See ya!

See ya!