‘Mad As Hell’ Summed Up Coles’ Reaction To The Aussie Milk Crisis Pretty Perfectly Last Night

Every now and then, one of the supermarket giants screws up so badly it captures the collective imagination — think Coles’ “freshly baked” bread that was made in Ireland months prior to hitting shelves.

Now a new controversy is brewing. Shoppers have been boycotting cheap Coles and Woolworths-branded milk en masse in favour of more expensive branded milk to support small Australian dairy farmers, who are struggling under the weight of a downturn in global dairy prices and dodgy pricing practices by major distributors.

As NATS @Barnaby_Joyce & @DarrenChesterMP DITHER, Maffra voters refuse to buy @woolworths cheap $-milk! #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/Xk1ojaezSh

— BeachMilk (@BeachMilk) May 24, 2016

But even as the push to help out dairy farmers gathers steam, Coles and Woolworths have come under fire for supposedly making it harder for shoppers to support farmers with their wallets. Customers have been publicly complaining that the supermarket pair have been deliberately refusing to stock branded milk in an effort to move their own product off the shelf.

All that has left Coles and Woolworths scrambling to deal with the PR fallout, with Coles rushing out a new ‘Coles milk fund’ branded milk that donates 20 cents from every bottle sold to dairy farmers in Victoria and NSW. While it’s better than nothing, the Council of Small Business is sceptical that the fund will actually do much to help farmers if it means shoppers keep buying supermarket-branded milk.

Digging into this sorry state of affairs, Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell had a pretty good summation of the situation on last night’s episode.