Web Directions

First FuelWatch, now GroceryWatch Canned

• In: Blog
• By:John
• June 26, 2009
• Leave a response

The Sydney Morning Herald is report­ing that the Australian Federal Government’s fabled GroceryWatch web­site has been scrapped. We wrote crit­i­cally about the dire acces­si­bil­ity of the site when it first launched. In the mean­time, con­sumer advo­cacy mag­a­zine Choice had taken over the project from the government.

What hap­pened? There are of course sev­eral sides to the story (see the her­ald story for details)

This quote from the Australian National Retailers Association is how­ever telling

We have always main­tained that Choice’s model was fun­da­men­tally flawed, as retail­ers could not pro­vide the data Choice was demand­ing, Ms Osmond said in a pre­pared state­ment. “Few con­sumers would have ben­e­fited from his­tor­i­cal prices for 7,500 items, includ­ing 50 types of mouth­washes and 25 types of bird treats, worm­ers, and vitamins.

I’d be astounded if retail­ers can’t pro­vide pric­ing details going back over gen­er­a­tions, and really isn’t it for con­sumers to decide what ben­e­fits them? But that’s beside the point — the retail­ers really should never have been in the loop.

Here’s a sug­ges­tion. Choice, why not pro­vide a mech­a­nism for con­sumers to pro­vide the pric­ing of goods they’ve bought them­selves. Then, you aren’t reliant on the retail­ers for the data, which seems to be the stick­ing point all round.

We here at Web Directions are happy to offer our advice, as valu­able or oth­er­wise as it would be, for free.

GroceryWatch is Dead. Long Live GroceryWatch!

Note to major retail­ers — the day is fast approach­ing where it won’t be the gov­ern­ment or choice keep­ing tabs on you — it will be your con­sumers. Yes, they do it in their hand­fuls now. Are you ready for when they do it in their thousands?

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