Surveillance of businesses behaving badly has been traditionally the greatest failings of our politicians and their regulators, and if you need reminding just let me point to the Hayne Royal Commission, which underlined just how bad our banks have been but no one did anything about it until Justice Ken Hayne came to town.

And again, we have a story of leadership failure with smart consumers, not the regulator, powered by the Internet exposing the questionable practices of Coles and Woolworths!

All of these revelations are now on show due to the fact that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is suing our biggest supermarket operators for sales promotions, which were misleading.

How did the ACCC get the info to bust Woolies and Coles? Simple, smart consumers dobbed them in!

The AFR’s Kylar Loussikian tells us of one case of a determined consumer/Reddit user, who: “…went trawling the internet for an explanation of how Woolworths was pricing Pepsi Max cans. Using Internet Archive, which saves old web pages, the user found a promotional price of $24. In April, they wrote, the price rose to $35 before settling at a new promotional price of $26.”

The user pointed out that Woolworths “…raised the price by $11 for a month, then dropped it $9 a month later. So realistically hasn’t been sold for more than $26 in over a year but claiming big price drops.”

Once alerted, the ACCC has used its high-powered technology and found hundreds of examples of price ploys linked to claims that have been misleading.

Undoubtedly, Coles and Woolworths will have a defence, but the ACCC thinks its worth investing public funds in court cases to bring these important players in Aussie consumers’ lives to book.

And not surprisingly, this comes as both supermarkets have had a big drop in their brand appreciation.

In May this year, Roy Morgan.com told us: “It’s official: Bunnings has again been crowned the most trusted brand in the 12 months to March 2024 after returning to the top spot in the final quarter of 2023.

“The ubiquitous hardware chain has increased its lead as Australia’s most trusted brand as previous leader Woolworths plunged from second spot in the last report, down 32 places to 34^th most trusted overall!”

What about Coles? Roy Morgan said: “Rival major supermarket brand Coles has continued its fall from grace, down from the fifth most trusted brand in the 12 months to December 2023 to the ninth most distrusted brand in the current rankings – an unprecedented fall of 221 places in the rankings!”

These revelations should mean big changes for the boards of these companies, which now have new CEOs, who are women. However, we also have to ask if the ACCC would’ve got onto this bad behaviour if they weren’t alerted by consumers, who are clearly doing the jobs our regulators are paid to do!

Ouch!