Mm.

Now, during this inflationary period, what's happening is they start doing this in late 2021 and then very aggressively in 2022.

But they really start unwinding these guardrails.

So for example, by early 2022, Coles has put in place a system whereby they need to sell a product for 12 weeks at the new kinda normal price to create that "was" price before discounting it.

But then by about March that year, they had reduced that down to four weeks, and that's when we get into this circumstance of a shopper going to Coles and paying more for a discounted item than they were just four or five weeks earlier.

This is actually the thing that ultimately tripped Coles up, in that they were changing their model or their guardrails so quickly and so aggressively at that time.

And that just raised the question, what's the point of having them? If Coles had previously thought, "We need to keep these prices for 12 weeks," and now it's four weeks, like, what is the purpose of those guardrails given they're not set in stone? That is, that they can just change them at will.

So on reputation, Jonathan, how much will this damage-Coles' reputation

If it persists and transport and delivery costs, uh, keep rising, how could that impact food supply, the price of other essential goods, housing?

Well, we're moving into what economists call stagflation.

So we have a stagnant, uh, a stagnant economy, uh, but rising inflation, and it's a very difficult thing for both central bankers, but also for governments to manage because looking at it from an interest rate perspective, if they raise rates to try and combat inflation, then they run the risk of running the economy into the ground and leading to more joblessness.

And if they kinda ease on the rates to help the economy, then they run the risk that inflation gets out of control.

So the thing with oil or the refined products like jet fuel and unleaded petrol and diesel, is that it just goes everywhere.

Anything that you transport, anything that uses freight, anything that actually uses that to make a product, well, the price will rise.

And as we learned in the pandemic, in the inflationary years after that, it's always the consumer that that lands on.

Are we looking at a scenario where that could start to happen?

It's in every part of our lives.

It's quite a simple equation.

The longer that this goes on, the more serious it gets.

And then it gets embedded into the economy.

It gets embedded into inflation and costs go up.

So initially, when I talk about the market or you could look at the stock market, people thought this would be a very short-lived event.

They thought there would be a bit of disruption, but that was okay.

Do you think that even if the government doesn't move, consumers might?