A federal judge has issued a landmark ruling ordering Australia's second-largest supermarket chain to stop claiming its prices are moving downward while actively raising them.
MELBOURNE — A federal judge has issued a landmark ruling ordering Australia's second-largest supermarket chain to stop claiming its prices are moving downward while actively raising them.
The fluorescent lighting of a suburban grocer hummed a low, steady A-flat above the dairy case on Thursday afternoon. Shoppers pushed trolleys with slightly misaligned front wheels past stacks of Tim Tams, unaware that the fundamental laws of arithmetic had just been formally restored by the Australian federal court.
Justice Michael O’Bryan handed down a decisive judgment against supermarket giant Coles, determining that the retailer’s aggressive “Down Down” promotional campaign was legally misleading because the advertised numbers were, in fact, getting larger. The ruling definitively establishes that under Australian consumer law, the word down cannot be used to describe an integer that is strictly greater than the one that preceded it.
The decision delivers a significant blow to the supermarket industry's long-standing practice of treating directional adverbs as mild suggestions.
Throughout the proceedings, the retailer’s legal team maintained that the concept of a discount during a period of high inflation should be interpreted as a fluid, atmospheric sentiment rather than a rigid mathematical formula. Lawyers for Coles argued that charging consumers more money was actually a form of saving, provided the price tags were printed on a sufficiently large red cardboard hand.
We have always believed that 'Down Down' is less about the literal cost of a block of cheddar and more about the emotional journey of the Australian consumer.
The court summarily rejected this defense. In his written judgment, Justice O'Bryan noted that while global supply chain pressures remain complex, the spatial definition of a downward trajectory has remained relatively consistent since the invention of commerce.
Following the verdict, Coles representatives confirmed they will quietly remove the signage from store aisles over the weekend, and are currently consulting with linguists to determine if they can legally pivot the promotional campaign to “Up Up.”