Coles got caught. Then the class action’s damages case got so tangled that a Federal Court judge openly admitted he can’t follow it. Welcome to “access to justice.”

In May 2026, Australia’s Federal Court found supermarket giant Coles misled shoppers on 13 of 14 “Down Down” tickets — prices quietly bumped up, then “slashed” back down to fake a bargain. A clean liability win. A genuine black eye for Coles.

Then came the damages phase. And the very same judge who wrote a razor-sharp 500-paragraph liability ruling is now, by this week’s reporting, openly struggling to understand how the class action even calculates what shoppers are owed.

If the bench can’t follow the math, what chance do you have of seeing a cent?

Liability was the easy part

Proving Coles fooled the market? Manageable. Proving what each shopper lost? A nightmare. Across 245 products and 15 months of millions of anonymous transactions, “your loss” stops being a fact and becomes a statistical guess — sampling, regressions, and assumptions stacked on assumptions. When a judge says he can’t follow it, that’s the model waving a white flag.

Your “class” includes people who lost basically nothing

Bought one Cadbury bar during the window? You’re lumped in with someone who did weekly big-basket shops for a year and a half. Average that out and you get a number that satisfies a formula — not a number that reflects what anyone actually lost.

Good luck getting paid

Nobody kept four-year-old receipts. So payouts get estimated, or funnelled off to unrelated “cy-près” causes when real victims can’t be found. The money drifts away from the people it was for.

Everyone gets paid before you do

Funders don’t take risk for charity. Between funding commissions, legal fees and admin costs, a fat slice of any award is spoken for before a single shopper sees a dollar. The headline figure and the cash in your pocket are two very different numbers.

Four years and counting

Conduct: 2022–2023. Liability: May 2026. Damages: still being fought in August 2026 — appeals looming. For a few dollars of loss per product, that’s not justice. That’s a machine that pays the funders, the firms and the lawyers, and hands the shopper the scraps.

If the judge is lost, so is your payout!