Supermarket rage!

As I've said before, I'm a dual citizen; born in New Zealand and became an Australian citizen in the early '90's (even though NZ'ers have permanent residency as soon as they get off the plane, I felt like I should become a citizen). So my allegiances get a bit mixed up at times, like when the All Blacks are playing Australia in Rugby Union, or the Kiwis and Aussies are playing a cricket match. 

Australia and New Zealand have had a free trade agreement for decades, so long I dunno when it started. New Zealand in fact used to be technically part of the Australian colony many years ago (but you won't find many Kiwis that will admit it). The distances were too great though to govern like that and so NZ became it's own colony. My point is that we have very close ties between the countries, going right back to white settlement. Economically today the two trade goods with each other with ease. 

Being here since the mid '80's I've had only one thing that I continued to buy from NZ when here, the NZ cheese Colby brand:

Have been buying it from Coles and others for decades. Other week I went into the local Coles and they'd stopped stocking it. I asked why to a worker there, who didn't know. Very strange to stop a line like that that's been successful for I don't know how many years, particularly in the eastern suburbs of Sydney which has a huge Kiwi contingent (we call eastern Sydney "West Auckland" BTW). I asked at the Coles front desk and they just gave me a complaint form to send off to some place in Victoria. Meh.....

I eventually filled it out, half-heartedly. Didn't see any point really, I mean as if they were going to listen to me. I was just a customer, not one of their grand strategic schemers. Didn't check any box to request getting a reply. Sent it in the snail mail and forgot about it.

They however replied. The reply though simply pissed me off much more than I had been in the first place. This is the letter they sent:

So, they're not stocking it as it's not made in Australia? That's just bullshit man. The truth is that they've taken the shelf space of the NZ cheese and used it to display their new Coles brand cheese. It takes up about a metre of fridge space, not shit. And it's the sort of cheese no self respecting Kiwi would ever eat; supermarket brand cheese, oh how utterly revolting! It'd be like eating plastic. Tasteless yellow slime. So much for choice eh Coles? All you want is to sell your own brand stuff and fuck everyone else.

Well fuck you Coles. I'm gonna chop up my FlyBuys card. If you can't be loyal to me I'm not gonna be loyal to you. In fact, here it is:

We should all revolt against the power a large corporation like Coles has. How is it even fair to lock out other competing brands by using those powers gained simply from the size of the company? And who decided the pre-requisite for not stocking something was that if it was from overseas? It certainly wasn't me, the customer. What about all those European cheeses then, are they going to come up with some Coles brand pseudo French cheese and can the actual French cheese? 

I don't believe them anyway that it's anything about buying Australian. It's about buying Coles brand, simple as that. Another example of Capitalism gone wrong..... Although it'd have to be argued that this isn't Capitalism at all, as Capitalism is about competition; something that Coles is killing.

To give an idea of how stupid this is, when I was in Lightning Ridge, in outback Australia, middle of nowhere, there was only one supermarket in town. There was no competition at all, and I did notice the prices were higher there. But guess what, I bought the NZ Colby cheese from there. Simon likes it too. So hows that, I can buy the cheese in the outback, but not from Coles in eastern fuckin Sydney. What a fuckin joke.