00:01This case is all about hundreds of items that were put on prices drop promotions and a product
00:08would be sold with a ticket that was red that showed prices dropped and there was a higher
00:14WAS price, say $14, and then a discounted price, say $8, and there'd be a cross through
00:21the higher price and so you'd see you were getting a significant saving.
00:25But what the ACCC alleges is that those were fake discounts because the saving price was
00:32actually usually higher than a price that had been charged a short time ago and this
00:38all goes down to whether discounts are genuine or not and that requires establishing a price
00:45for a reasonable period of time.
00:47But there's no clear red line in the law about what that should be, so it means that Woolworths
00:52had to come up with its own internal guidelines and the ACCC has alleged that Woolworths, over
01:00time, reduced the period of time for those discounts to occur.
01:04So it went from months to weeks, so it was discounting faster and faster.
01:10And even when that was happening, the guidelines were still being broken in some of the cases
01:16for products like fab laundry powder for Oreo biscuits and others.
01:22Woolworths says the amount that those guidelines were broken is overstated by the ACCC, but this
01:28really goes to a key part of the case that we've heard a lot of cross-examination on where
01:34Woolworths is trying to defend its practices as it related to these internal guidelines in terms
01:43of whether this shows that people were misled on the prices it charged.
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