DISAPPEARING FOOD DISCOVERED

Life is just full of trials, if you're a lefty:

Have you noticed how many food products that you have bought for a long time are no longer available?

This has been happening a lot to me lately so I started ringing the food manufacturers to find out what's going on.

Three have now told me, two in a roundabout fashion and one directly, that they are no longer manufacturing a particular product because of Coles & Woolworths. They said if these two chains won't stock a product then there is no point in making it anymore.

This is to be expected considering Coles and Woolworths couldn't care less about customer service or loyalty:

“Coles and Woolies are in the business of making as much money as possible, and will piss off their consumers as much as they possibly can whenever they can make a buck out of it, stopping just short of pissing them off so hugely and permanently in such large numbers that they will go to all the extra cost and inconvenience of trying to find an alternative place to shop. If they blow the fine line between day-to-day common and garden variety pissing consumers off and really permanently pissing them off, too often, at too many stores, they could go bust, if they don’t correct the extreme annoyances in time, which they probably will because by and large they know where they are pissing customers off and where they can get away with it, so you can’t beat them, even though you are always dissatisfied. Fact.”

Well, of course evil corporate giants don't care about their customers, they pay their CEOs far too much.

Then there's also the problem of the type of people one runs into at Coles:

I somehow end up Coles on pensioner days when the old blokes are there. Discussing our prostate problems and the best type of Depends does nothing for me.

Yeah, old people are such a drag. (That might have been me he was taking to except I prefer these to Depends.)

I can't speak for the rest of Australia but in the large West Australian regional centre where I live there are lots of alternatives to Coles and Woolworths. There's a good sized independent supermarket not far from me that carries all sorts of stuff not stocked by the two majors. The fabulous Ridder cheese is even available despite Coles' and Woolworths' efforts to drive it off the market.

The thread had 54 comments last I checked; as far as I could tell not a single product was noted as pulled off the market on account of Coles and Woolworths refusal-to-stock policy.