Coroner & Legal
Woolworths and its worth to winos
Woolworths. The biggest Australian supermarket chain is obviously a gold chip investment stock for the working families, and a good employer for the members of the humungous Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association — the ‘Shoppies’ union — from which such Labor luminaries as Senator Don ‘The Godfather’ Farrell, Premier Mike Rann, executioner Peter Malinouskas, and the much-discussed Bernard Finnegan MLC rose to power.
Woolies hit the heads last week with a first-half net profit after tax of $1,155 million, a leap of 19.4 per cent over the same period last year.
“Our role as retailer is positioned midway between the customer and the producer and it’s a balance we play everyday,” said CEO Grant O’Brien. “We have got to make sure we are delivering better value to the customers so they are getting value and increasingly globally comparable value.
“At the same time we have got to make sure we have got a sustainable supply chain and manufacturing base and that’s the wire that we tread but the customer is the reason why this business exists and that’s who we favour in those negotiations.”
Woolies has a great deal to do with the Australian wine business. It owns liquor chains like BWS and Dan Murphy’s, lucrative enterprises which supply cheap alcohol to those same working families.
More houses for more of the working families so beloved by Labor need more supermarkets which employ more Shoppies to supply more members for Australia’s biggest trades union which gives Labor lots of money and more recruits to be shot into parliamentary power by the faceless bosses — like those who swung their axe on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and South Australian Premier Mike Rann — and supply those working families with more cheap booze at the expense of hardworking highly professional small scale family grapegrowers and winemakers … photo Kate Elmes
Many who shop in these stores have no idea they’re part of Woolies.
Even fewer realise that the wine they buy there is made, not by some ivy-shrouded bluestoned artisan, but by Woolworths’ own wineries. “Wine made by Woolworths” is hardly something you see on back labels. They should be forced by law to fess up.
Let’s start at the bottom end of that “sustainable supply chain”.
Woolworths owns Cellarmasters, one of the biggest wine refineries in the Barossa. It recently expanded into another vast wine factory in the old Penfolds site at Nuriootpa, extending its capacity on a grand scale.
While it does not stretch its risk to the tenuous business of vineyard ownership, Cellarmasters certainly knows how to turn the poor fortune of grape farmers caught in an over-supplied market into good returns for its working family stockholders.
Read more of this brilliant expose by Phil White, The Drinkster, here
• And don’t miss: COSTCO and ALDI crash into big box wine retail
Extract: I’ve seen the future of wine retailing, and it fills me with horror … So do us all a favour: support the last of the independent wine merchants. Buy online. If you have an independent wine shop left in your neighbourhood, support it. You’ve seen what Woolworths and Coles have done to our food choices. You’ve seen how they destroyed the dairy industry – don’t let them do it to wine or we’ll end up in the same mess. And Costco and Aldi? Do you really want to buy your wine from people who don’t know the difference between wine and toilet paper? Essential Reading: http://theskinnyperth.com/2012/10/22/the-great-supermarket-swindle-how-coles-and-woolworths-will-soon-own-your-life/
Pic: From here
• Earlier on Tasmanian Times, Barbara Mitchell, Woolworths and Coles – There are Alternatives