The Chaser Report - Can We Have That Taken Off The Record?

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

Remember that time that Woolworths' CEO Brad Banducci stormed out of an ABC interview early after trash talking the former ACCC head? And then how he conveniently had his resignation afterward? Wonder what he's up to now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Charles and Dom. My name is producer Lachlan filling in briefly before we get you into another cracking replay episode of The Chaser Report. Do you remember at the time that Brad Banducci, the Woolworth CEO, left an ABC interview early? Apparently, you can't just say mean things about someone, demand that it gets taken off the record anymore in interviews. What's up with that, you know? It was a pretty hectic moment for the ABC to have caught on camera that shows that sometimes these CEOs just aren't as good at the job as we are led to believe.

Of course, this isn't the case at The Chaser, where our CEO is a really, really smart guy, really cool and kind and caring and always does their work. and just a well-rounded, well-intelligent, well-endowed person who always lets their employees out of the basement for being good. Hi, Charles, I love you. Anyway, I thought it might be fun to listen to this episode today and recall the time we got to watch a CEO absolutely shit the bed on TV. Please enjoy.

Before we go on, Dom, I just want to say, I am storming out of here. I am storming out. But Charles, this is on the record. I've had it with you. But we said this was on the record. record. Also, why are you wearing that weird name tag? Why are you wearing a Woolie's name tag? Oh, excuse me, I'm just going to casually sip some water from this bottle as well.

Oh, see, I'm just a man of the people. Yeah, and you're wearing a Woolsey's crew polisher? That's, do you expect me to believe that the CEO of Woolworth's wears, like, the thing that someone, like a Woolies Metro would wear when they're stacking the shelves? Yeah, well, when you're just pulling in seven million dollars a year, Dom, you're just, you're just one of the workers. You just, you just, you just, this is a satirical. technique where we pretend that one of us, Charles in this case, is Brad Banducci, CEO of Warworths. And I must say, the person who tweeted, I think it was yesterday or the day before, Brad Banducci to resign to spend more time with his family in five, four, three.

Yeah, absolutely now that he was it got a, let's ever listen to the audio before we go any further because this is, this is timeless stuff. His words are that we have, by the way, I don't think you would impugn his integrity and his understanding of competition law. I'm just saying the world has got much more competitive. He retired 18 months ago. He's not... Okay, let's...

Can we take that out? Is that okay? Sorry, let's just keep going. Are we going to... Sorry, what are you unhappy with? I shouldn't have said that right about it and retired. Well, you did say it and... I mean, he is retired, but I shouldn't have said that, Angus. Are we going to leave it in there if we are?

Well, I mean, we're on the record. You said it. I mean, you know, let's move on. But... Yeah, no, I think I'm done, guys. I do this with good intent. You know, I don't do this with bad intent. You're walking out, really? No, no, no.

Can we just talk to Brad for a set? Let me just... Can we just have a minute? We'll be finished and see. I love that Rod Sims is able to get someone to resign, a major CEO, while not even running the A Triple C anymore. That is power. I know.

It's the opposite of what Brad was saying. Like, that guy's still got it. 18 months out. Absolutely. Yeah. And Brad has $24 million in. Woolworth's shares. So he's still got it as well. Oh, what? He's got 24. I didn't see that. I knew that he was paid

$7 million. It was that his exit bonus, 24 million. Yeah, and you'll never believe the amazing metaphor that all the report, I read multiple stories about this today. And they all said, guess what he's got in his trolley? $24 million. And I was like, it's not a fucking trolley fuck off. He's plays you rich. Hey, let's talk more about this after we make some money ourselves. Okay, so I'm really regretting not talking. talking about this story yesterday on yesterday's podcast. We would have looked so prescient, wouldn't we?

Yes, because I was saying to people yesterday, I was one of the people who was predicting it was like, he's going to be gone by the end of the week. And we are like, I hate it when my predictions don't go on record early enough. But I'm counting this one. When you look at the footage, I mean, I must say my initial thought was this is not a person who is good at this job. No, exactly. So the thing is that a CEO of a fucking duopoly has one job. He has one fucking job, which is to maintain the social license, to appear like this nice guy who isn't going to fuck you over.

Because he's just in a polo shirt and he's got a name tag on because he's just one of the guys. So you can see how his PR team sort of went, okay, we'll make you look like just one of the guys. And you can be all friendly and things like that. But from the word go in the interview, he was like argumentative. Like, I think it's sort of one of those things where you sort of think of a CEO as calculating enough to be able to go, okay, well, actually, I'm going to just, you know, box the ABC journalist in as being argumentative. And that's, and my strategy is going to go on the attack, make him look like he's just doing a hatchet job on us. and that's how I'll get through.

But actually, you sort of look at it and you go, no, I don't even think that was the strategy. I think he just literally lost his, lost control. He just, and probably, actually, he's been in meetings his whole life. He's probably failed upwards across his entire career. Being a white man, that's what you tend to do. And he's got to the point where whenever he gets a bit, you know,

sick of meetings or, you know, grumpy or, you know, he's having a bad day. because the golf didn't go quite his way, you know, on the front nine or whatever. He just goes, oh, I'm storming out of here. And that works in a corporate environment where, you know, there's no accountability. Yeah, exactly. But Charles, I imagine he's part of the problem. Like, can you imagine the pricing reviews at Woolies going through?

And probably the underling is very gently saying, look, Brad, people are kind of doing it a bit tough. Could we maybe just reduce the margins just a little bit? Like, just we'll look good if we're. I don't know if we just make only a couple of billion instead of many billion dollars in terms of our bottom line and he's going, no, no, get out of it! And you're like, you're not saving the punter assent.

But Charles, this is the thing I wanted to mention. So, strangely enough, you're doing the Wankanomics tour at the moment, right? You're in Adelaide selling a lot of tickets. You're doing corporate language. It's a guide to how to be in the corporate world. We're teaching people how to speak in corporate speak, how to make their communication less clear and more incomprehensible.

I mean, have you had to change your materials to cover this? Because what he needed, perhaps he should come and see the show, he needed platitudes. He needed nothingness. He sort of needed to be able to say nothing. Well, he could have said, oh, look, we're very concerned. We'll get back to you. We'll circle back. Yes.

We'll commission a report. Yes. I've got my best people looking at this. Let's put a pin in that. Let's put a pin in that. Let's put a pin in this. Yeah. It's circumstances beyond our control.

Yeah. There's externalities. You know, don't you hate it when externalities make things impossible to solve? And, you know, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. I know what you're coming from. Yeah. Who do you want me to sack? Like, that's what you can say. You can put it back onto the person. I could bring prices down. Which of our people who do you want me to make redundant?

Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah. Put it back on the ABC Journal. Who do you want me to sack? Yeah, because I can. If you want me to make less money for our shareholders, yeah. They were ordinary Australian super funds. Yeah. I can just sack people. But here's the thing you might not know about me, Charles.

In an earlier life, more than half my life ago now, I worked as a management consultant at Woolworth's. Oh, really? I did. And you're not supposed to say who your clients are. Not for very long, admittedly. But it's pretty funny. It's a pretty strange environment there at Bella Vista.

Is the whole Woolworth's duopoly thing your fault? Are you to blame for Woolworth? I love the notion that I had anything like the amount of power that I could make a recommendation. So you had to go out to there, to Bella Vista, did you? To Bella Vista. To one more worse way, Bella Vista. For people who've never been to Bella Vista, which I think would be 100% of people, it is, it's like corporate utopian dystopia or something. Like, it's sort of this campus out in northwest Sydney, which is designed to be, I suppose, appealing to corporates.

But it's sort of, like, it's very American. Like you have to drive. To middle of nowhere. Yeah. It's a corporate park. Yeah. It was a very long cab from the shiny office tower in the city. That much I can tell you.

And we all did it all the time and charged it back. But the funny thing that I can mention is that the name tag thing is very, very real. So when we were there, I actually found it very odd. It was almost like a cult. Like everyone, even the very senior executives that we were there with, like I think at the time, the guy called Roger Corbett was sponsoring our work, who later became the CEO and all that kind of They would wear these weird name tags like they worked in the supermarket as though they were just regular guys. So the high-owned Brad thing, they all do it at the Hoolies campus.

Absolutely. That wasn't even a strategy. That was just him. I don't know about the polo shirt. That might have been a strategy. But no, they wear the name tags. But just trying to pretend, oh, I'm the same as you, minimum wage, you know, shelf stacking person. I just happen to make $7 million a year.

The other thing they're told us hilariously was just wear a white shirt. Like, don't dress like corporate fancy. definitely don't wear cufflinks. We were told absolutely no cufflinks. And in management consulting, cufflinks, or certainly back then, like people had fucking monogrammed cufflinks. That was the kind of wank fest that we were in on. But no, we were looking at supermarket pricing.

That was the thing we were working on, and it was very interesting. And was it all about making it feel like you were getting a bargain, but actually you're not? Was that the sort of psychology? Because it's all about psychology, isn't it? Well, I can tell you... My favorite brand of Musley. I'll give you an example.

My favorite brand of Musley. Oh, that looks fancy. Yeah, it's fancy. Dorset cereal. Gosh, you're doing well out in Adelaide, aren't you? $9. Breaking in the coin. $9 is what you've got to pay for it.

Except every second week it goes on sale, and it's two for $9, right? And so you always buy it for $4.50, and you go, oh, I've got a real bargain. And then you realize, hang on, it's still a rip-off in $4. $1.50. But the psychology is you've been anchored to this price point, which is so ridiculous that then you don't pay attention to the rip off. That's exactly what they do. And the great thing is that they get suppliers to fund those like two for one offers and all this kind and stuff. So they're making money either way. When you see those specials, yeah, Woolies is making and coal. Same thing. They're making money from the suppliers to try and move more

stuff. But the thing I can tell you that we were working on, and I think, I don't think I'm breaking any confidentiality rules 20 years later, is that there's a massive pricing database, which I had access to. Like, I had the access to every single price for every single SKU in the whole of Woolies across the country. And where you are, where the store is, determines the price. So if you're in a silver tail area, it's going to be a lot more. But if you're right next to, I don't know, let's say a German discount supermarket, you

best believe they monitor all the prices there and kind of adjust them to be much the same. So go and shop at a supermarket, you know, next to an Audi. Right. And you'll pay... Or go and shop at Aldi. You could. But the hilarious thing we were working on was this philosophy called Everyday Low Price.

And the concept was that instead of having the high and low pricing like you're talking about, we just say this item, we've locked in the price and Cole still does this. It's always going to be the same price. And Walmart invented this and sort of promoted it. And I love the notion that it was this sort of revolutionary concept that we're just going to make the price low every day. Like, oh my God, what a brilliant idea. Let's pay millions of dollars for this little gem.

So, yeah, the rot started with me, Charles. The rot started with me 20 years ago. But it's funny you should mention management consultants because actually, the CEO, Brad, Brad, Brad Banducci, yeah. Banducci, released a statement explaining his departure. I think it was the Woolworth's sort of PR team released it earlier today. and immediately James, who I do Wankanomics with, texted me the text of it and said,

do you think they actually came along to our show? Because it literally reads like a segment that we've got in Wankanomics about how to write your brand story. I'll read it out to you. Let's do that after this. The Chaser Report, less news, more often. So James texts me and goes, just saw this statement from Woolworths.

They must have come to our show. And this is the statement. We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Amanda. There's some new woman as the same. Amanda Bardwell. Amanda Bardwell. As the group, CEO of Woolworth's group, as the group starts its next century of creating better experiences together for a better tomorrow. And he's honestly, it's great.

It's like, I love it. A better tomorrow. The other part of that, the other part of that statement that I really loved was that it said they conducted an extensive international search. and decided to promote the head of, like, Woolies X or, like, the person who was working on the, like, new different funky willies. All those willies that are, like, a convenience store. Oh, the Metro, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And so the obvious next CEO, after an extensive in national search, spending presumably millions of dollars of shareholder money, they've just found the obvious person to do the job. Don't you think the whole thing are, like, so let's go through the thing. The CEO stuffs up and has a fucking disastrous interview on Monday.

He's not going anywhere. He's not going anywhere. By Tuesday afternoon, his position becomes completely untenable. And suddenly it's like, oh, no, well, we've actually been searching for months. No, no, like, he was always about to retire straight after the fucking car crash of a shit. I think it says here. It's just untrue. It's just not true.

I can be emphatic about this point, said the chair, Scott Perkins. I can absolutely emphatic. The process has been in train. There was no change to the timetable, no expedition at all. You know, it was always, and external factors didn't have anything to do with it. How extraordinary! You can come out and say that. But I suppose the point is, if you are as powerful as Woolworth,

if you can literally just price your price at whatever you want and just, you know, price scourge the entire Australia, of course you can also lie to your shareholders. It's just part and parcel of what you are. That's why the CEO stormed out of that interview, because, you know, he was being held to account. That is not part of what being in Woolworth is about. Well, Charles, unless, and this is my theory about it, unless the CEO rang up and said, Mace, not great, you know, not a great interview there with four corners.

The chair. Let's chat about it. Yeah, Scott Perkins rang and said, Brad, you know, we've got to do some brand management. And Brad just went, no, I'm out of it. Yeah, exactly. How dare you, this is off the record. Yeah. But the thing is, what I don't.

I don't understand it's because I think part of the whole thing was like he wanted to take something off the record that he'd said on camera. Like surely as, you know, somebody who works at Woolworth, you'd be used to being on camera. Yes, I've enjoyed the chase of headlines on this. Yeah, 71. 71. Someone's recording without your explicit permission, are they? All right. Yeah.

I don't know how that happens. 71 cameras in per Woolworth store. Like when you walk into a Woolworth store, an average of 71 cameras are watching you. And they want you to know that as well. They want you to know that you've... Well, they have to. Basically in the gulag of all words. Well, some of these retailers didn't have that advertised.

I remember Kmart had all these cameras tracking you when you walk in, even with facial recognition, building customer profiles of people, and they didn't announce that. So that's why they've got all these signs up. The thing that surprised me during that interview, Charles, is that after he stormed off, we didn't hear clean up an I-1, clean up an I-1, giant miss been left behind. See what I did that.

What I reckon is going to be really interesting, is whether the evil Greens' plan comes to fruition, right? Because Nick McKim, who's the Greens senator, who's in charge of this part of their policy platform. Didn't he come on the show and take a swing at them? He did, yeah, quite a while ago. Friend of the show, Nick McKim, he tweeted today that this was actually all part of their plan. The Greens plan?

Yes, and getting this Senate inquiry into the cost of living and stuff was actually the first step in corroding the social license of the duopoly that he calls in Woolworths, right? And that, you know, the next step is obviously to start breaking up that market power by, you know, getting them to sell off part of their stores and actually meaning that they don't have this enormous stranglehold over the supply of groceries to Australia. Gosh, I wonder where the Greens got the idea of, like, breaking up a cozy duopoly. of two entrenched groups

that don't need to work very hard anymore. It's strange, I do you. I wonder whether I do that. But how are they going to do that? Are they going to start a supermarket chain? Are we going to get like Bantmart? Well, wasn't Franklin started by Whitlam? I'm pretty sure that was a Whitlam era.

I don't know whether it was started. Certainly it came in under a sort of Whitlam era set of market reforms. So, yeah, no, I mean, but well, the obvious thing to do is to literally break it up Because part of the problem, as you said, part of the problem is that they own 67% of the consumer market. But actually, just as big a problem is the fact that if you're a supplier, you are basically at the mercy of these, you know, if you're a farmer or any sort of wholesaler, you're at the mercy of Coles and Woolworths. And the only way you can deal with that is to actually split them into five and go, actually, we're going to have proper competition. Because it's not so much a monopoly that's the problem. It's the monopsony, if you want to get into technical.

Is that a word? Yes, monopsimony. It sounds like a bad, that sounds like a marriage where lots of people are involved. It's when a monopsimony is when there is a single buyer rather than a single seller. Oh, Medicare. Yeah, and a single buyer has enormous power. over their suppliers because you're the only person buying or the only organization buying. So that's why, yeah, breaking it up.

And Nick McKim's going, okay, step two, let's do it. Well, Charles, this just makes me think it's time at last to put our money where our mouth is. Oh, yeah. And launch a supermarket chain. Yes, I've always wanted to. If we could do something really nimble, something very technology-based, maybe just cut out, maybe don't even have retail supermarkets at all. Just really innovate, maybe build something.

some of the warehouses close to where people live. Yes. And just get stuff delivered, I don't know, on an electric bike or something. Yep. Get a whole bunch of people to come over. And we pay them proper wages and insurance and stuff. Yep. And they'd just order on an app.

It'd be very, very quick. Yep. It'd be really great. And because we were paying them a decent living wage, we'd go broke in six months. Yes. Then we would sell our brand assets to Warworth. To Woolworth. Yes.

And we'd be milk run. Yes. And we'd make a lot of money. Yes. Well, I think we are very set up to be, to do the first part of that plan. Like setting up a badly run app that loses money is sort of our core business. Didn't we do that already? Yeah.

We had a chase her up at one point. That was a lot of fun. It actually worked quite well. I just lost a lot of money. Well, that's a good idea. The other thing that they've started to do now, and I just was reading about this the other day, is that the private label thing where they have a suite of their own brands and you can't tell which ones are made by Coles and Woolie.

So they've started competing against, for instance, like, men, manufacturers of spirits by producing their own gins and vodkas and whatever. You can't tell who it's from. Well, that was in the whole corners. That was in the four corners. Oh, there you go. That and I also discovered, shockingly, that Australia's sort of number one or two retailer, brand in every single category now is ANCO, the Kmart house brand.

Yes. And presumably Woolies and Coles will do the same thing. So you can't even have an independent business anymore. You just have to supply the Woolies and Coles Geopoly. I do love the fact that, you know, like, if you go to Italy, you know, the top brand there is like, is it Versace? What are Italian brands? Versace is Italian? Versace, yeah, yeah.

And, you know, in France, it's like Christian Dior or something like that. Yeah, or Moet and Chandon. Yeah, Moet and Chandon. And here, it's Anko. Anko. And they're our top. And, you know, even in America, it's like Nike and, you know, and stuff of that. Here, it's Anko.

In every category. I agree. Anco. And, you know, maybe we should just not stop worrying, sit back and enjoy the, enjoy the... So that's the problem with Coles and Woolies. Khamart's basically a monopoly now. I think they've absorbed target. Big W is nowhere to be seen. Just sit back and buy the cheap Anco shit.

As soon as Anco starts retailing groceries, I'm not going to Coles or Woolies anymore. Right, exactly. And the thing is, the brand values of the most successful Australian brand ever, is cheap shit from China. Cheap shit from China. That doesn't last for very long. Yeah. Yeah.

But who cares because it was so cheap? Just put it in the tip. Yeah. I love it. Fantastic. Can we sell ANCO chaser merch? Yeah, maybe we should get on that bandwagon. Just buy their stuff.

Put a chaser sticker on it and charge 10% more. No, no. The thing that would upsell it is the ANCO brand. We should get the... The Chaser annual should be called the ANCO annual. The ANCO annual. Now you're talking. Finally a business plan.

Yeah, finally is a business plan. Our gear is from Road. We're part of the Iconicless network, but I'm storming out of here. Good riddance. We've got another CEO ready to go, actually. Craig, get on in here.