Choice Grocery gets the can
Competition minister Craig Emerson it appears has decided that competition is not such a great thing and out an end to the new Choice Grocery website, which was due to go live next week. Read the full article on News and The Australian, or maybe there is more to it and we the citizens are not considered sophisticated enough to understand why anything that will help manage duopolies and potentially keep prices down should be a good thing.
This was a well funded website, with good resources involved. The first effort is reported to have cost around $6m before being canned and the Choice Grocery, to date reported at $7m of the $13m. With 1 week to go before the site goes live, why would you cancel such project? The only possible reasons maybe:
- The supermarket lobbyists are a lot more convincing than we might think
- The supermarkets can bring a lot more pressure to Government that we might think
- Some powerful people out there really do not want any sort of spot light brought onto grocery prices
- The site was really really bad, $7m how bad can it be?
According to Livenews, they just come out and say it. Pressure from the big supermarkets is believed to have caused the Government to abandon their election promises and admit the site is not feasible. Seven million dollars later…
Choice was not told direct and Mr Emerson communicated the news after meeting with Grocery retailers. Hang on a second. if this is correct, he decided this was not feasible with the very people it is meant to manage and potentially cause to reduce their prices and profits. So the players decided the aims of the site which is being developed by an independent part, being the trusted consumer brand Choice, were not feasible. There just has to be something wrong with that picture, I cannot put my finger on it right now though.
