‘Coles will be with you all the way’.
The utopian Australian experience under an expanding corpratocracy. When will Coles expand to hospitals, schools and funeral homes? Then we’ll only need to have one rewards card – and maybe if you build up enough rewards points, you will be rewarded with a free burial voucher.
(At least Coles does pay taxes).
Apart from Coles’ 756 supermarkets, 810 liquor outlets, 92 hotels, and 636 fuel and convenience stores (2013), Wesfarmers has diversified its interests by acquiring other companies:
There’s Bunnings Warehouse (over 200 stores, which could supply coffins to Coles Funeral Service), 150 Officeworks, Kmart (190 stores), 263 Kmart Tyre & Auto Service centres, 183 Target stores and 125 Target Country stores.
There’s Wesfarmers Insurance – 89 WFI offices, 26 Lumley offices, 32 OAMPS offices and 23 Crombie Lockwood offices. And don’t forget Resources, like Wesfarmers Resources open-cut coal producers in Queensland, or Wesfarmers Chemicals, Energy & Fertilisers (WesCEF) which produces and markets chemicals, fertilisers and gas products. Wesfarmers Industrial and Safety businesses include Blackwoods, Protector Alsafe, NZ Safety, Bullivants, Coregas, Blackwoods Protector, Safety Source, Total Fasteners, Packaging House and GotStock.
Finally, Wesfarmers has a 50% interest in investment house Gresham Partners plus interests in Gresham Private Equity Funds, 50% interest in Wespine, a plantation softwood sawmill at Dardanup, Western Australia and a 24% interest in BWP Trust which mainly owns Bunnings Warehouses tenanted by Bunnings Group Limited.
Wesfarmers has 100% interest in many other subsidiaries BBC Hardware, Coles Ansett Travel, Coles Group Superannuation Fund, Coles Property Management, Comnet, Fosseys, GJ Coles & Coy, Grocery Holdings Pty Ltd, Harris Technology, Howard Smith, Katies Fashions, Loyalty Pacific, Masters Home Improvement New Zealand, Morley Shopping Centre, now.com.au, Theo’s Liquor, Tooronga Shopping Centre, Tyremaster, Viking Direct and World 4 Kids.
This was a letter (I was cc’d on) sent to radio personality Alan Jones (in appreciation of his efforts for taking some of them on)
“Better be nice to Coles from now on!
Soon they will own your nursing home and employ short term visa people to give you your needles and drain out the rest of you after your fill from the Coles leftover food department delivered by the Coles Delivery and Postal Couriers.
Their doctors will prescribe some friendly medication and the Coles Pharmacy Departments will provide the medication paid for by the Coles medical Benefits Scheme.
Nursing Home entertainment and distractions will be provided by the Coles Advertising Department singers and outings to Coles supermarkets will be regular entertainment with Coles commission agents available to place wagers on all track events at the Coles Betting Agency.
As a profit making asset, you will be kept alive until there is someone else take your bed, then you will be carted off by a Coles funeral parlour car to a Coles mortuary for an autopsy be a Coles short term visa examiner.
The embalmers will source their material from the top shelf of the local Coles store, just underneath the ‘aluminium free’ deodorant section.
Pursuant to the terms of your Coles life Insurance Plan and the their medical benefits scheme you will be required to be either; interned at a Coles ‘place of rest’ or cremated in a Coles furnace, all provided exclusively for loyal Coles lifelong customers.
There will be an address with a heartfelt eulogy from the Coles Professional Eulogy Department.
If you have a Coles platinum credit card and have earned sufficient loyalty reward points, your mourners will be provided with the dulcet tones of the Coles pre-recorded eulogy voiced by one of the Coles senior board members expressing their grateful appreciation of you lifelong loyalty and you will be publicly acknowledged with a summary of your favourite and most frequent purchases from one of the Coles outlets.
For those outlasting most of their relatives and friends and they, being outnumbered by the presence of a contingent of debt collectors – some from the Coles kindly Debt Collecting Department, a gaggle of mourners will be available for hire to provide accompanying suitable hymns by the Coles Advertising Department Singers.
Some proposed recitals will not be acceptable and regarded as offensive, such as the little ditty; ‘…..we are the fresh food people…..”.
Naturally, the service will be provided and conducted by a reverend from the Coles United Brethren, alternatively the Cole’s Atheists and Sceptics Association.
Coles yearns to please, the ‘passed on’ and those in sorrow, accordingly, the Coles Delicatessen Department and staff will provide a suitable venue and sustenance for the mourners to reminisce and tell stories of your life and times as loyal Coles customers detailing the lucky times when bulk specials were a ‘steal’ with the usual sales price only marked up 10%.
Each mourner present will receive a $50.00 Coles voucher, as provided pursuant to their Coles Medical Benefit Scheme and paid for from loyal lifelong premiums.
At this time, Coles cannot ascertain the degree of comfort or place of residence for their customers having passed on or just, by ‘disappearing’.
Naturally Coles does not provide any warranties either way as for the future state or comforts.
It is however expected that in the very near future after certain negotiations are complete, provision may be provided under the proposed Coles After Life Indulgences Plan. It will be a genuine service providing that; for addition fee on the Coles Insurance and Medial Benefits Schemes, an eternity of comfort will be guaranteed with all one’s desires immediately serviced to a high degree of satisfaction.
I would presume that the Wesfarmers people own the bank that will be underwriting the Cole’s services and future plans.
RIP”
I’ve been going into this local Hardware shop for years – a family biz. The other day we discussed how business was going. Well, they survive – just. Since Bunnings set up shop a few kilometers away (now many years back) – their business dropped 50%. They adapted to earning half as much and working much longer hours.