Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain…

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use them. /1 https://t.co/uojWMUHRX6. https://t.co/5VHuCBrm9i

Nobody is forcing shoppers to go with the Big 2. This is the fact few will accept. Society is social. This is social behaviour, with social explanations. You can see here that marketing knows why this is happening. It’s not economics. /2 https://t.co/nzgzqlozw8 https://t.co/CiIPae0qtj

Nor is it collusion or price gouging. Even if these things are happening, they’re not what keeps the Big 2 the Big 2. Quote: “This research distinguishes between rivalry between firms (inter-firm brand rivalry) and rivalry between consumers (inter-consumer brand rivalry).“ /3

“1) outside actors like firms can promote inter-consumer rivalry through inter-firm rivalry and 2) promoting such conflict can actually provide benefits to consumers as well as firms.” Rivalry. There it is. Status, team sports. /4

Those who don’t see Coles v Woolies as exactly the same social behaviour as Ford v Holden, or NSW v Queensland, or Labor v Liberal, or nuclear v renewables, is missing the exact same social behaviour in each case. Two main opposing teams. It’s how we run everything. /5

Years of branding deliberately generates this, to tap into this deep social need. People are Coles people, or Woolies people. For all their own reasons. Nobody is forcing them to be. And quite a few aren’t. They shop at Aldi. Or IGA. Or Costco. The cheaper options are there. /6

Which in the idiot economic view of the world is competition already happening. Which should drive customers away from the Big 2, to the cheaper options. Except it doesn’t. Because societies don’t run on price, just as they don’t run on information. They run on status. /7

Branding knows this, have we not been paying attention to the enormous shift in business towards branding activity? Away from all the nonsense about markets and competition? Even the anti-trust-like ‘break up the duopoly’ stuff is team sports. /8

Certain teams use that as their rallying cry, like The Greens and consumer groups. Never mind that economies of scale is what actually brings prices down, not competition. By far the cheapest option for consumers is always ‘single payer’ government-owned systems. /9

But we maintain the fiction of the economy, with our productivity commissions and competition and consumer commissions demanding we do all the market things that don’t work, and which nobody actually wants. All because we refuse to see societies for what they are. Social. /end