Are the discounts real? What an Australian court decided a sale price has to mean

What the Federal Court actually found

Justice Michael O’Bryan handed down judgment in the ACCC’s case against Coles on 14 May 2026. The case concerned Down Down promotional pricing across 245 common household products between February 2022 and May 2023.

Of fourteen pricing tickets put before the Court, thirteen were found to be misleading and likely to deceive an ordinary consumer. The Court found Coles had engaged in conduct in trade or commerce that was misleading, because the products had not been sold at the stated higher price for a reasonable period before the reduction.

Penalties are still to be determined at a later hearing. Judgment in the parallel case against Woolworths was reserved.

The twelve week number, and why it is the useful part

The judgment is worth reading for one sentence in particular. Justice O’Bryan said that if the ordinary consumer were told that the product had been ordinarily sold at the "was" price for a period materially shorter than twelve weeks, the consumer would not believe that the promoted price was a genuine discount.

Twelve weeks was not plucked from the air. It came from Coles’s own internal pricing policy from January 2022, which required a product to sit at the higher price for twelve weeks before it could be discounted. The Court took the company’s own standard and measured the conduct against it.

That gives shoppers something they have never had: a number. Not a vibe about whether a sale feels real, but a period a court has treated as the point at which a before-price becomes believable.

This is not the first time, and the penalties are not small

Dell Australia paid a $10 million penalty in 2023 over misleading strikethrough pricing on computer monitors sold as add-ons.

In November 2019, four furniture retailers, Plush, Koala Living, Early Settler and Oz Design, each paid $12,600 in penalties over was and now claims. In one example an occasional chair was advertised at $799 with $200 off, when its regular price over the preceding six months had been $699.

The pattern across all of these is the same. The advertised saving was measured against a price the product had barely, or never, actually held.

How to read a sale price now

You cannot see a product’s price history from the product page. That asymmetry is the whole problem, and no amount of consumer scepticism fixes it.

What you can do is treat the crossed-out number as an unverified claim rather than as information, and make your decision on the price you are actually being asked to pay. If $89 is a fair price for the thing, buy it. If it is only attractive because it says it was $149, you are buying the sticker.

• Decide whether the actual price is worth it. Ignore the saving.
• A discount that runs continuously is not a discount, it is the price.
• Screenshot the page if the amount matters. It is the only price history you will have.
• Sale-item exclusions on returns are not enforceable. Your consumer guarantees survive a discount.

What we do about it on this site

We read the retailer’s live product page, record the price, and print the date we checked it on the card. When a price moves, the card changes and the date moves with it.

We do not run a was and now display, because we cannot verify a before-price any better than you can. A price with a date beside it is a claim we can stand behind. A saving is not.