Can you find a Coles staff member to scan your groceries after 8pm? If only they did acknowledgement of customer as well as they do Acknowledgement of Country!

It was revealed this week that Coles supermarkets now print an Acknowledgement of Country on the bottom of customer receipts.

Most people throw receipts straight in the bin, if they bother to take their receipt at all.

Could there be a more vacuous piece of corporate virtue signalling?

An Acknowledgement of Country is how the cool kids demonstrate to everyone that they respect the traditional custodians of the land they are on.

Nothing says ‘we respect you’ like placing an acknowledgement of Indigenous people in small print, right below the Harry Potter Collectables promotion and just above the liquor sales advertisement.

The receipt reads:

Coles Group acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia. 

We recognise their strength and pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. 

Coles Group extends that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and recognises their rich cultures and continuing connection to land waters.

Meanwhile, I’m just wanting a staff member to acknowledge me at the checkout and recognise my full trolley.

A Coles spokesperson told Sky News Australia this week:

‘Coles Group is proud to include an Acknowledgement of Country on our receipts.’

Forgive me, but how exactly is that cause for pride? Do Indigenous people check their receipt to make sure they have been acknowledged, just like the rest of us check our receipts to make sure we haven’t been overcharged?

And do Indigenous people ever think, ‘If Coles is acknowledging me as the traditional custodian of this land, why are they charging me $6 for a lettuce?’

If I was to ask my local Coles staff which of the 250 Indigenous nations my receipt is proudly acknowledging, could they tell me? Would it even matter?

And if I, as a non-Indigenous person, screw up my receipt and toss it in the trash, am I a racist?

I am not mocking Indigenous people, but Woke virtue signalling like this certainly mocks them – or at the very least, it commercialises and cheapens the sentiment. A nod and a wink to Indigenous people on a grocery docket might make Coles head office ‘proud’, but does nothing to make a meaningful difference to even one Indigenous person.

Did men and women in Jilkminggan on the Northern Territory’s Roper River – where there is a scarcity of jobs, housing, services, and income – sleep better last night knowing they were acknowledged on my shopper docket?

Of course not.

The three-paragraph acknowledgement helps Woke-suits in the corporate hierarchy pretend that virtue signalling in small print on the edge of a docket no one reads somehow demonstrates their rectitude.

If Coles want to acknowledge people, they could begin by acknowledging unvaccinated people.

It doesn’t matter how healthy or well-credentialed you are, if you’ve not been vaccinated you cannot work at Coles, not even to stack shelves late at night.

If you’re unvaccinated, don’t even bother applying for a job at Coles. No jab, no acknowledgement. So inclusive. So virtuous. So humane.

Imagine the conundrum when an unvaccinated Indigenous person applies for a supermarket job. They won’t look at your resume, but don’t worry, just wait until you get a load of your receipt!

You can follow James on Twitter. You can order his new book Notes from Woketopia here.

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