Key facts
- Coles' website and app experienced outages after a Reddit post revealed deep discounts on alcoholic beverages.
- A 24-pack of Jack Daniel’s & Cola was priced at $27, down from $130, representing an almost 80% discount.
- Coles attributed the issue to a technical error that incorrectly priced select 24-pack beer and ready-to-drink products.
- The company will refund customers who were charged the incorrect prices and has corrected the error.
- The operators of CW Scanner suggested the error might be related to AI integration on Coles' platforms.
The website and app of Australian supermarket chain Coles experienced significant outages after a viral Reddit post revealed substantial discounts on 24-packs of alcoholic beverages. The post, which gained over 180,000 views, highlighted prices slashed by nearly 80%, with a 24-pack of Jack Daniel’s & Cola marked down from $130 to $27.
Coles confirmed a technical error led to the incorrect pricing of select 24-pack beer and ready-to-drink products on its website. The company stated the error has been corrected and that impacted customers would be notified. Any customers charged the incorrect prices would be refunded according to normal processes. The website and app briefly returned online, but the beer and premixed drinks categories were removed before the site went down again.
The operators of CW Scanner, a price tracking website, suggested the pricing error might be linked to AI integrated into Coles' platforms, possibly due to a wildcard search term that incorrectly included 24-packs when intended for smaller quantities. They identified numerous affected products, with average discounts of $49 on beer and $111 on premixed drinks. The largest discount observed was on Smirnoff Crush Mango & Peach cans, reduced from $202 to $29.
This incident follows a previous court finding that Coles' 'Down Down' promotions sometimes misled customers about genuine price reductions. The CW Scanner operators noted that promotional prices on Coles and Woolworths have often switched on and off in sync over the past two years.