WOW...radical thought...stick to RETAILING, page-283

Our friend here is clearly a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Woolworths is hardly in turmoil, the CEO made a couple of stupid moves bringing bad publicity, crashing the price, but basically no fundamental damage was done, he is gone now which is good news for the company’s image and the running of the company, and we’ll soon return to fair value. These unhinged posts serve as a good example of heavy but fleeting public reaction to the fiasco. Woolworths now has the convenient response of ‘We are committed to being wonderful, we even got rid of that CEO who was making some questionable moves’

Obviously in the real world there is zero chance of Woolworths being forced to sell half its land and of course as you say much of it is leased anyway. If there ever was to be legislation to increase competition, it wouldn’t be a sudden sale of half of Woolworths and half of Coles (that level of disruption would cause widespread grocery shortages and incredible price rises for years), it would be something to allow gradual increase in competition; the government may be incompetent and corrupt, but they’re not stupid enough to cause utter catastrophe in the grocery sector - even if you think extreme pain for possible long term benefits to the consumer are worthwhile, the many years of pain in the mean time would be utter political suicide for the government, and that’s if they suddenly stopped being corrupt as well as becoming utterly insane.