The author – Peter Wilkinson
In my previous post, I asked: When is a lie not a lie?
That concerned the Federal Budget, where taxes were introduced that the Government promised it wouldn’t introduce.
Two days later, Coles got caught doing a similar thing by the Federal Court.
On 14 May, Justice O’Bryan found Coles had manufactured discounts under its Down Down campaign. Products weren’t genuinely cheaper. The ‘was’ price had been inflated just beforehand to make the ‘discount’ look real.
Of 14 Down Down tickets examined, 13 were misleading.
The higher-ups knew:
What makes this worse, Coles had its own internal rule requiring a minimum 12-week price establishment period before a Down Down promotion could be applied. They understood the standard.
Then, in March 2022, they cut it to four weeks to keep pace with Woolworths.
That’s what the Court called a ‘race to the bottom’.
Former ACCC head Allan Fels was blunter: “This decision was made at the highest levels of the business by all the top executives involved, and the board would have known about it.”
So the defence that ‘prices were rising due to inflation’ wasn’t just rejected by the court. It was contradicted by Coles’ own internal documents.
The cost, besides loss of trust:
Coles reported over $1 billion net profit last year.
Under Australian Consumer Law, each contravention carries a maximum penalty of $50 million.
Former ACCC head Fels expects “hundreds of millions”.
The cost, loss of trust:
Consider the context. A Foodbank Hunger Report 2025 found one in three Australian households experienced food insecurity in the past year.
Coles and Woolworths together control roughly 65% of Australia’s $120 billion grocery market. That’s the environment in which Coles manufactured false discounts.
Whether you’re a government or a supermarket, the basic expectation is the same: don’t deceive the people who depend on you.
Trust = Truth + Transparency. It’s simplistic, but it’s where we start with clients coming out of a crisis. Tell the truth first. Then reveal enough about what you’re doing to fix the issue, to be trusted with the rest.
What Coles could actually do:
Reinstating the 12-week rule that Coles abandoned is the obvious starting point.
There’s a bigger opportunity. With AI, Coles could publish the full 18-month price history of every product on their app. Add a QR code on the shelf. Let customers see if “Down Down” is genuine.
Then put the CEO’s voice behind it.
“Here’s where we went wrong. Here’s what we’ve changed. And here’s the data so you can check that ‘Down Down’ really means down.”
That would land very differently to what Coles stated after the case, that it was reviewing the judgement, lawyer-speak.
A note on leadership: We are entering an era, thanks to AI, where deception is getting more expensive and truth is getting cheaper to verify. That to me provides, not a risk, but an opportunity.
