It’s the jingle you can’t get out of your head. Coles might wish you’d never heard it

A ’70s riff, Reddit threads and “human error” have put Coles in a tight spot after a week in the Federal Court, but the result in the “case of the century” is anyone’s guess. AdvertisementSupermarketsIt’s the jingle you can’t get out of your head. Coles might wish you’d never heard itBy Jessica Yun and Elias VisontayFebruary 20, 2026Coles made a number of concessions to the ACCC about its discounting decisions.Matt WillisSaveYou have reached your maximum number of saved items.Remove items from your saved list to add more.ShareAAARetail consultant Trent Rigby was doing an eight month stint in Coles’ marketing team in 2012 when he got a jingle stuck in his head. It was “Down Down”, the supermarket’s riff on British rock band Status Quo’s 1975 hit song of the same naming, playing so often in the office it lived “rent-free” in his head for weeks.“It changed everything for Coles,” Rigby says. “I genuinely reckon ‘Down Down’ is probably one of the most effective brand jingles Australia has ever produced.”It could also end up being one of the most costly after a bruising week for Coles in the Federal Court in Melbourne. There, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is trying to prove many of its “Down Down” discounts were false in what former competition tsar Allan Fels think is the “case of the century.”Over the course of the week — and there will be another to follow — the ACCC’s top silk, Garry Rich, SC, peered into the plumbing behind Coles’ discounting decisions, extracting admissions, having testy exchanges and facing repeated denials to his pointed questions.Along the way, a room of the nation’s legal elite have been subjected to multiple versions of Coles’ ads featuring the jingle that Rich said “sticks in one’s ears for longer than is healthy.” The results of the case – which is essentially trying to determine what a discount actually is – will linger for a lot longer.Inspired by RedditAt the height of public fury about inflation in late 2024, the consumer watchdog lobbed separate legal bombshells at Coles and Woolworths in by accusing them of “illusory” discounts on products that were actually the same price or even higher than before.AdvertisementIt has arguably been a case brought by the people. Dollar-savvy users of social media site Reddit unwittingly helped craft the ACCC’s investigation: in one thread, user sec-rose laid out how much the cost of her entire Coles shopping list, an online order of 52 items, changed across roughly a year. The same basket that cost $192.80 at the end of 2022 was $225.75 by August 2023.Other netizens piled in with their own examples. “Lucky dog dry dog food [jumped from] $6.50 to $11 overnight. Scumbags,” commented Minimum-Divide2186. “Soon I’m sure they’ll drop it to $10.90 and claim it’s ‘Down Down!’” jeered sec-rose in response.Not called as a witness in the litigation: Coles chief executive Leah Weckert.Glenn CampbellSharing supermarket faux pas has become its own corner on social media. In another post, user MattJak shared a picture of a red and white “LOW PRICE” ticket of $9.80 with a white sticker behind it that said $9.50. When this masthead raised similar issues with Coles in September 2023, the grocery giant treated two examples as isolated incidences before revising its statement to describe it as an “error”.But in the theatre of the courtroom, it hasn’t been Coles’ top brass Leah Weckert squirming in the witness stand. Day-to-day category managers overseeing product ranges at Coles such as pet food divisions, have had the minutiae of their “discounting” decisions combed through with forensic intensity.Coles’ staff are not short on legal firepower backing them up, though. Leading the defence is John Sheahan, KC, one of the nation’s most expensive barristers, who has previously been reported to have charged $25,000 or more per day. He acted for Nine, publisher of this masthead, in its successful defence against defamation proceedings from disgraced Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith.Down Down’s “compelling” labelsAdvertisementAs internal emails on pricing negotiations between supermarket middle management and their suppliers were read out before the court, the nation got a glimpse behind Coles’ deli counter to see exactly how its sausage of pricing decisions is made.What emerged was the ever-shifting rule book behind the coloured pricing tickets Australians rely on to make shopping decisions, which the company calls its “guardrails”.An “Every Day pricing” (which it turns out is a specific piece of jargon to Coles, not a general descriptor) ticket, red and white with no price comparison on it, has to remain set for a minimum of six months.A “Down Down” promotion, meanwhile, can only be set following a “price establishment period” of a minimum window, according to Coles’ internal documents tendered at trial.But internal emails aired by the Federal Court showed that this window is malleable: what was 12 weeks became four amid competitive anxiety to keep up with Woolies.But even that much more liberal four week requirement proved too high a hurdle for some of Coles’ managers, who admitted to court multiple times the