Why I confronted the new Woolworths CEO
It’s a great time to be a corporate executive in Australia. While the rest of us are pinching pennies to afford a $9.50/kg block of Woolworths tasty cheese, Amanda Bardwell, the new CEO of Woolworths, is clocking in a salary of $2.15 million. That’s almost 227 tonnes of cheese per year!
Industry bosses have grown accustomed to avoiding the people whose lives they are destroying. That’s why I seized the opportunity to confront Bardwell when she visited the Woolworths store in Warrawong, a suburb in NSW’s Wollongong, earlier this week. Approaching Bardwell near the fruit section, I asked a straightforward question: “What do you have to say to the fact that your company is profiting off price gouging in the context of a cost-of-living crisis?”.
The response I got was baffling. It was like receiving an AI-generated email reply, “Thank you for reaching out to us”. As a former Woolworths employee who recently received back pay I was owed for seven years, her claim that she was there to support staff members was even more offensive.
Woolworths and Coles are systematically ripping us off. Both chains are being sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for scamming customers with their “Prices Dropped” and “Down Down” schemes. The supermarkets have been temporarily jacking up the price of some goods by at least 15 percent, and then reducing them to an amount that is still higher than or equal to the original price to trick people into thinking they are saving money. We are being swindled under the guise of a bargain.
Then there is the outright price gouging. Anyone who has been to a supermarket in the last two years can attest to this. For instance, in March 2020, that 1kg block of Woolies cheese was $7.90—that’s a 20 percent increase. Since the pandemic, Woolworths has recorded its highest ever food business profit margins at 6 percent in the 2023 financial year, according to the Guardian.
The problem is that, for the most part, what Woolies and Coles are doing is completely legal. The ACCC is not empowered to stop them from hiking prices; it’s only empowered to sue companies that are reasonably believed to have broken consumer law. It’s not illegal for the owner of a billion-dollar supermarket chain to hike prices during a cost-of-living crisis, even if it means that the average person in Australia is now consuming fourteen grams fewer vegetables and twelve grams fewer fruits per day compared to last year, according to a report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So much for “the fresh food people”.
Private companies should not have the right to control the supply of an essential good like food and deny it to those who cannot afford their outrageous prices. At a minimum, the Albanese government should be enforcing price controls. Further, the government could be taxing the mega-profits of these corporations and redistributing them to help those who can’t afford the weekly grocery shop.
My confrontation of Amanda Bardwell struck a chord with ordinary people—a video of the encounter has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on TikTok. Maybe she’ll think twice before her next publicity stunt parading in front of the same customers she is bleeding dry.
