Nath@aussie.zone 1 week ago
It would be cheaper and faster to build supermarkets than trying to force Colesworth to sell their stores. They’d drag the acquisitions out for years in the high court, arguing the compensation for their stores, and that they’d need to be compensated enough to build new stores to replace the ones they lost to the government. And they’d probably win.
If new supermarkets are going to be built either way, the government may as well get the new ones.
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t see how it would be faster to build than to buy. Supermarket builds take several years.
Legally I think the problem goes away when you considee market saturation… You have a certain amount of buyers in a given area, and once there are enough shops to serve those buyers then adding any more shops would cause market saturation… Nobody makes enough profit, bad times. So, the suggestion to buy out an established shop, rather than trying to set up a shop in an area that would saturate the local market and mess with multiple businesses is not a bad one.
Yes, Coles/woolworths could sue them if they used eminent domain or similar to force a buyout. But the duopopy would be just as likely to sue if the govt built a brand new shop in an area that existing retail already served (which would be the whole point). So… Sued by 1 business in scenario A, or sued by multiple in B…
Nath@aussie.zone 1 week ago
It will come down to how corrupt a government is vs. how willing it is to get in there and get stuff done. The WA government has just finished building 72km of rail lines, two tunnels under the river, several train stations and a whole workshop to build trains in ~7 years. As a project, building 200 supermarkets would be similar in scale. Wollies recently bought a property not far from me, knocked it down and replaced it with a store in less than two years. So on an individual level, we’d see stores coming online in 2-3 years, and the rollout finishing in under 10. The government can make stores fairly identical.
If the government told Colesworth “Hey, nice thing you have going there - we’ll take it.”, they are of course going to fight that tooth-and-nail. Even assuming you managed to get the legislation to pass (that in itself would face massive resistance from the business community), you can’t just buy the stores themselves. You need to them for the lost revenue, costs to replace their lost stores and you’d be buying stores of different sizes/shapes/state of upkeep. These legal proceedings would drag out for years - and I think Colesworth would have a decent chance of either winning, or forcing the Government to pay more money than just building stores would have cost. Once the government got its hands on these ex-Colesworth stores, they would not all be standard. They would have different layouts, different building ages/states of upkeep. Fitout and maintenance would be a far bigger problem to solve than if the stores were purpose-built new.