All Australians should be able to shop for food and other essentials, and access the lowest possible prices at supermarkets, without having their data collected and shared for targeted advertising of harmful products.
Supermarkets should provide fair and transparent pricing information and should not push people to buy and spend more to access lower prices or discounts.
However, supermarkets are exploiting people’s everyday shopping for groceries and essentials to target them with aggressive marketing and pricing strategies, such as:
- forcing people to join loyalty programs to access lower prices and discounts, enabling collection and sharing of their data for targeted alcohol advertising, including with alcohol retailers and digital platforms, and
- using unfair and potentially misleading pricing claims and promotions to push people to spend more, including on harmful products such as alcohol.
The use of these strategies to market alcohol has significant harmful impacts, and disproportionately harms people experiencing alcohol dependence or trying to reduce their alcohol intake.
Summary of recommendations
FARE supports the introduction of a prohibition on unfair trading practices in the Australian Consumer Law. This should include the following unfair trading practices by supermarkets and other retailers:
- Requiring membership of loyalty schemes to access lower prices, discounts or other benefits.
- Collecting people’s data through loyalty schemes and sharing and using the data for targeted advertising.
- Bulk purchase, multi-buy and minimum spend promotions that require people to buy or spend a minimum amount to access a lower price, discount or other benefits.
- Confusing and potentially misleading price claims and promotions, including claims that lack the information needed to verify them.
