Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275

by boffbowsh • 3 years ago

660 367 3 years ago

mastodon.gamedev.place

michaelhoney• 3 years ago

This is a great thread, and it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens.

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens

Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing.

My guess, nothing, as the government regulators who are supposed to watch over this, will find nothing wrong, as they're already bought and paid for to go work as lobbyists or "consultants" for these retailers once their stint in politics is over.

Why do I think this? Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed.

The country is so corrupt, it's rotten to the core. As a consumer and taxpayer you are being legally fleeced form every direction with the blessing of the government, but this is probably true in many other countries.

iraqmtpizza27• 3 years ago

If the retail stores are price fixing then why are their stock prices down so much this year? Their investors are getting savaged. What did they do with all this extra cashflow?

the_mitsuhiko14• 3 years ago

Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed.

I would love a citation for that.

lxgr6• 3 years ago

Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can

How was it not blatantly obvious that something is off if the exact same product from an Austrian manufacturer (not owned an international conglomerate) is consistently 20-30% cheaper in a grocery store in Berlin than it is in Vienna, minutes away from the factory where it's produced?

I'm honestly surprised that it took the recent inflation for people in Austria to get wise to the fact that they've been overpaying on groceries for at least a decade.

Especially in the western federal states bordering Germany I would have expected people to regularly go grocery shopping across the border (although supermarket prices aren't uniform within Germany; I have no anecdata about Bavaria, for example).

nebula8804• 3 years ago

Wow it feels as if you are writing about the US. Guess "the grass is always greener" and all that.

gsich3• 3 years ago

Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing.

Well they could prove it (ie take the receipt with you), but got lame excuses for why is's cheaper in Germany.

parineum2• 3 years ago

as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing.

The data does not clearly show that at all. It shows the expected result of inflation in a competitive market.

When Company A decides that it's time to raise prices on Product B due to inflation (maybe their wholesale price went up), Company C, being under the same market pressures to raise prices, also raises their price but, because they still want to be competitive, they don't raise them beyond Company A. Reacting to the market isn't collusion, anti-competitive or anti-consumer. If you just reverse the direction the prices are going, it seems a lot less sinister and it's still the exact same inputs/outputs.

The whole thread is made of points like that, especially the "asymmetrical information warfare" bit. He's scraping the websites for this data, right? Obviously that information is available at home. Moreover, the situation has actually dramatically improved because of the internet. You can now put together a cart on two different websites and go to the cheaper store if you'd like. Try doing that twenty years ago. I used to have to read the weekly ad to know these things, now I can just look online.

The _only_ point that's being made is that Austrian prices are a bit higher than other nations and, for some reason, he thinks it's because the companies are conspiring in some way and not that it's, for some reason, more expensive for those companies to operate in Austria. That seems like the obvious solution to me since they appear to have a competitive market with a few major players.

midasuni4• 3 years ago

“asymmetric information warfare”

I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

“asymmetric information warfare”

That's also a powerful tool for wage suppression and it's been used for decades to constantly low-ball workers.

Thank god in the last decade we saw a lot more transparency online through user provided open source salary data, which helps even out this asymmetry a bit and have workers demand their market value and hope to not get massively low-balled like before.

I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.

It only works for those who set the prices as they can collude on price/wage fixing whereas workers and consumers can't organize in similar fashions.

lotsofpulp11• 3 years ago

It has also been shown that much of the population prefers buying something for $x if the price tag claims it has been discounted rather than $x without the claim of a discount.

wongarsu• 3 years ago

Assuming an efficient market, price strongly correlates to (some measure of) value. Now if I over you something that's worth $5, or alternatively something that's worth $10 but that for a short you can purchase for just $5, which item do you choose?

Of course ideally you would properly evaluate how much the item is worth, in utility, quality, longevity, social status, resale value, ethical production, etc. But that's difficult (often on purpose). The seller knows what the item is worth, you have to guess, or just use price as a weak proxy.

So in a sense, people preferring discounted items is an effect of asymmetric information

marginallen2• 3 years ago

Asymmetric information warfare is the method of abuse for all systems; “free market” that is nothing like it, “democracy” that is not the self-interested will of the majority, and also the false solution to “free market” and the “saving democracy” that are pushed by the oligopoly ruling class system in a false guise of social justice or “wokeness” and claims of saving fake democracy.

isodev• 3 years ago

What?

carapace• 3 years ago

The "free" in "free market" refers in part to free flow of information. Surfacing information about prices is kind of the point of a market. It's a mechanism that assigns prices "automatically" (as contrasted with central planning, etc.)

I don't know much about economics but I know, or think I know, that much.)

ahoka3• 3 years ago

More generically, free from economic rent.

ahoka3• 3 years ago

When there’s asymmetric information, then it cannot be a free market by definition.

j7ake4• 3 years ago

To check price of items in Austria, the website is here:

https://heisse-preise.io/

Browsing around, the prices look very reasonable and inexpensive to me.

For example, 500 g bag of peanuts is 4.59 euros, the price has fluctuated between 3.39 to 5.59 euros over the years.

Peanuts name is “Kelly's Erdnüsse geröstet & gesalzen”

living_room_pc3• 3 years ago

You have to keep prices in relation to salary and other CoL expenses. Europe in general has lower salaries than the US, this is true of Germany and especially Austria. For me 4.59 for erdnüssen is too high for my kart.

the-dude5• 3 years ago

That is ridiculous expensive for peanuts.

lotsofpulp11• 3 years ago

On the US west coast, I just bought 1,816 grams (4 pounds) of raw peanuts for $8.00.

Edit: if the comparison is dry salted peanuts, then Walmart sells Planters brand for ~$3.50 per 500 grams.

MrYellowP• 3 years ago

I'm Austrian. This is insanely expensive.

bowsamic6• 3 years ago

Where do you live where that is reasonable?

timeon2• 3 years ago

heisse-preise

I remember that show.

pbhjpbhj4• 3 years ago

£2.70 GBP per kg in Tesco (mid-range national supermarket). That would be €1.57 for 500g roasted salted peanuts.

living_room_pc3• 3 years ago

Had a "oh shit" moment reading the article. I live in Germany, and of course buy groceries. The "discount" games seem very obvious now. Food expenses have risen very significantly recently.

Great article, I hope this gains more traction and or legal ramifications for the grocers.

quitit• 3 years ago

One trick I noticed while doing data input for supermarkets (in a different market) is that price rises are always advertised as promotions.

Say a supermarket has a $1.10 item and they want to increase that product to $1.50. They'll up the price to $1.50 immediately, and add a "40c off" to the ticket. The consumer sees "promotion" and assumes it's a discount, when it's actually just the same price as usual.

Then ~2 weeks later(depends on average buying frequency) the promotion sticker comes off and the product is now at the higher price.

Every time you see a promotion ticket, you can cynically assume it's a price increase.

KptMarchewa• 3 years ago

Now in Poland every promotion needs to display lowest price for the product in last 30 days l, effectively countering this strategy.

Semaphor• 3 years ago

Pretty much not for me. I both have a bunch of products imported from receipts over the years, and I remember many per 100g prices for products I regularly buy. This simply does not happen, at least not at the stores I shop for the products I buy (note that I don’t buy any finished meals or processed food outside the occasional salami, so my habits are pretty different from most people).

matsemann• 3 years ago

I think that would be illegal in most European countries. It has to be a "real" discount. Often means to have been sold at the original price advertised for at least a month.

elashri• 3 years ago

Kroger do this all the time. I don't know about other stores but kroger is actively using this tactic aggressively and other dark marketing schemes.

em-bee8• 3 years ago

it's like a warning: last chance to get this item at the old price.

justinclift• 3 years ago

This exact behaviour was used in Coles supermarkets here in Australia, to raise the price of cheese just over a month ago.

Noticed it happening at the time, and kept an eye on it.

parineum2• 3 years ago

What's your preference, that they just raise the price to $1.50 without the discount?

As long as the price doesn't go back to $1.10 after the promotion is over, I don't see anything wrong with that.

MandieD3• 3 years ago

REWE and Edeka have trained me to only buy “fancy” (Mövenpick, Cremissimo) ice cream when it’s 1,99 EUR, not “normal” price of 3,99, and to prefer whichever is “on sale”.

And I detest that decent ice cream only comes in ridiculously-shaped thick plastic that’s only good for chucking in the Gelbe Sack, not in waxed paperboard or at least a sensible container to reuse for other things.

hoc• 3 years ago

Of course you are supposed to keep and collect those useless containers (plus lid) since you "surely will be able to use them for something" in the future. For storing screws, rubberbands and Kulis that nobody has or keeps anymore... A roll of Gelbe Säcke might fit inside.

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

Funny how the two most pro-Russian EU countries, Hungary and Austria, are the ones suffering the worst inflation despite continuing to trade with Russia.

The only parts of the countries doing well are Budapest and Vienna that are both controlled by opposition parties.

helpfulContrib6• 3 years ago

Austrian inflation and trade with Russia: please explain how this is related?

Is it because corporations are being used to put the squeeze on the Austrian people? Sanctions?

Because nobody wants to do trade with Austria?

In which case, there must surely be examples? I'd love to know a few.

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

Pro-Russian right-wing parties in Europe are blaming inflation on our sanctions on Russia. If that was the case Hungary and Austria would not be the the countries that are worst affected by inflation.

codethief• 3 years ago

Both Hungary and Austria are still buying huge amounts of gas from Russia (Austria: 71%, Hungary: 80-85%) and also oil in Hungary's case (80%)[0]. Meanwhile, other European countries had to look for more expensive alternatives. One of the main reasons given for inflation in those countries was the energy crisis. What's the reason in Austria & Hungary?

[0] https://oesterreich.orf.at/stories/3194035/

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungary-agrees-optio...

yakubin2• 3 years ago

Hungary yes, but Austria doesn’t seem to be doing all that bad. Eastern Europe is doing much worse.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/225698/monthly-inflation...

0xDEF3• 3 years ago

Isn't that the June 2023 inflation numbers? How do they include increased natural gas prices doing winter months?

iraqmtpizza27• 3 years ago

Um, Hungary took on huge amounts of debt starting in 2020. Forgot to mention that, huh?

Paradigma112• 3 years ago

Cant talk about Hungary but in Austria the reason is the incredibly broad and untargeted financial assistance for everybody because of the energy crisis and covid.

The reason for this is technical incompetence and cowardice of the government. They could not have done something better even if they wanted and they fear the voters far too much to let some hurt go through the system.

I am no rich antigovernment libertarian but there can be no surprise that all those measures

https://www.klimabonus.gv.at/en/

https://land-noe.at/noe/blau-gelber-Strompreisrabatt.html

https://www.bmk.gv.at/themen/energie/energieversorgung/strom...

https://www.arbeiterkammer.at/antiteuerungspaket ....

have some effect on inflation.

Paradigma112• 3 years ago

Just to reiterate, my electricity bill last year went down from 1k to about 650Eur because of some aid or another while I am sure some family cant afford basic necessities.

mqus• 3 years ago

have some effect on inflation.

But how does this concretely affect supermarkets? They presumably didn't raise wages, they didn't have to pay more for their wares(at least not at the level they raised their prices at, after all they have probably long-term contracts at generous oligopoly conditions) and their electricity bill is maybe at most 10% of their cost. This is purely extortion.

derelicta• 3 years ago

Truly shows how Free Markets are the most efficient

jiofj2• 3 years ago

That's nice if we forget about the ECB printing money like there's no tomorrow.

dangerwill• 3 years ago

Capitalism can't fail it can only be failed

ta1243• 3 years ago

Which explains why inflation in countires like Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Luxembourg are all under 2.5% as they famously don't use the Euro.

lxgr6• 3 years ago

That could be an explanation if the entire Eurozone were affected uniformly by inflation. It's not, though, and Austria is seeing the highest levels.

A big contribution to this is the government's policy of heavily subsidizing various costs: Energy, rent, even groceries were subsidized via various vouchers and payments for a while, and now there's even discussions of "capping interest rates" – of course inflation won't go down if the purchasing power remains inflated!

Note that I'm not concluding that this is necessarily a bad development: It might just be an effective way of redistribution – but only time will tell, and personally I'm glad to not be part of the experiment.

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

If food and housing gets too expensive, then sorry mate, nothing we can do about it, that's just how the free market™ works, try working harder.

But when labor gets too expensive pushing wages up, then it's no longer the free market, but it's a "labor shortage" catastrophe all over the media and we have to shed tears about the poor business owners wo can't afford a second Porsche, so immigration gets turbocharged until wages come down to their desired levels that businesses can agree is "fair".

scrollaway• 3 years ago

I dunno, sounds more like a problem with the news you read. Here, inflation and the price of groceries makes the front page on a very regular basis.

CTDOCodebases• 3 years ago

Then when wages do come down and questions get put to politicians and the central bankers about the lack of wage growth they shrug their shoulders and act confused like it's some unsolvable math problem.

iraqmtpizza27• 3 years ago

have you ever tried building a house? it's one of the least free markets there is. the quickest way to get arrested is to buy cheap land and start putting up houses willy nilly

midasuni4• 3 years ago

The beauty of housing going up is the “work hard” in tears wages which then increased the price of housing.

The land owners take all the extra work and laugh all the way to the bank.

Of course if people collectively decided to work half as hard there would be less money for housing and then prices would come down. Workers wouldn’t lose out.

helpfulContrib6• 3 years ago

A majority of the food brands in Austria lead directly back to Nestlé ..

beebeepka2• 3 years ago

It's almost the same here in Bulgaria. Been doing my best to avoid their products but they managed to buy a ton local companies over the years.

lotsofpulp11• 3 years ago

What are the profit margins for Austrian retailers?

In the US, all the retailers earn razor thin profit margins (except Home Depot/Lowes), indicating if prices were lower, the businesses would fail, or at best become charities.

Edit: for the one Austrian retailer I could find numbers for, they are not pretty. Not sure how the retailer can lower prices without going out of business if they already have sub 1% profit margins.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37534333

lxgr6• 3 years ago

We're talking about grocery stores here, not just general retailers. I have a really hard time believing that US grocery stores are operating on razor-thin margins here, given how extremely expensive groceries are (when adjusting for income, other cost of living etc.) compared to e.g. Germany.

One problem of the Austrian grocery store market is that there's just way too many branches per capita (compared to the otherwise pretty similar market of Germany again), which brings down margins.

LUmBULtERA• 3 years ago

This was a really interesting read! I find it so tiresome trying to evaluate food prices and optimize grocery shopping to optimize [time and money spent], and a large data set like this could make it much easier. Is anyone aware of a similar price analysis for the United States?

lotsofpulp11• 3 years ago

Another way to go about it is to check the profit margins of your sellers. In the US, all the big companies are publicly listed, so as long as you shop at Costco/Walmart/Target/Kroger/Albertsons/etc, you know you will not be paying more than a couple percent above what it costs the retailer to sell to you.

Obviously, individual items within the store have different margins, but almost all unprepared / expiring foods will be at the lowest margins.

Winco/Aldi/Lidl are other grocery businesses where it is known the markup is extremely minimal.

the-dude5• 3 years ago

Potatos ( in or outside supermarket, large bags ) have literally doubled in price YoY in NL.

I get 5kg instead of 10kg for the same price. Same month, last year.

mthoms• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if it's still happening but... there was a potato shortage during the pandemic. At least here in North America. It had to do with a disease affecting the crops IIRC.

the-dude5• 3 years ago

What I understood from actual farmer : fuel and fertilizer.

bowsamic6• 3 years ago

I'm still shocked after moving to Germany how much more expensive potatoes are here than in the UK.

British loose potatoes are 70p per kg from Sainsburys. I'm sure you could get them cheaper elsewhere.

Here in Germany the absolute cheapest is like 1.40 euro per kg, much more common 2.50 (!!)

The wage is a little higher so I have adjusted somewhat, also the quality is arguably slightly better, but still...

There are only two things that are significantly cheaper in Germany than in the UK: alcohol (especially beer and wine), and tobacco

poorlyknit• 3 years ago

You might like to check out the cheaper end supermarkets, you can get 1kg potatos for 0.60ct at my local Kaufland (when they're discounted). Just get enough so they last until the next discount. Normally they're around 1.00€.

65103• 3 years ago

https://european-seed.com/2022/09/drought-drops-european-pot...

SushiHippie3• 3 years ago

[dupe]

SushiHippie3• 3 years ago

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37530314

dang• 3 years ago

You're right, of course, but that one got hit by the flamewar detector (kind of correctly, unfortunately), which sank the thread. There's obviously community interest in this story, so I think we'll leave the current thread up and merge the comments hither.

As compensation for luu (surely one of the best HN submitters of all time) I've put this one in the second-chance pool, which will give it a random placement on the front page:

Birth Order (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532299 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)

If anyone wants to read a long rabbit-hole description of how we handle these cases, I wrote one for some reason a couple weekends ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364619

thih9• 3 years ago

The title of the original submission is just “Inflation in Austria” [1], it did not spark my interest.

This submission caught my eye because of its more descriptive title and the mention of scraping.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37530314

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

Yeah, that title was very uninspired. Especially that probably some don't know where Austria is on the map.

l0b0• 3 years ago

  > Then we also got German and Slovenian stores.

Do they mean foreign companies operating in Austria, or separate DBs/web sites for other countries? (The forks[1] don't have legible names) I'd love to see a New Zealand one, as we have a big problem right now with rising cost of living and lots of suspicion of shenanigans.

[1] https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise/forks

zwarag• 3 years ago

He added foreign stores that sell the partially sell the same things. Sometimes these stores also sell Austrian products which are cheaper in those countries than they are in Austria.

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

Most famously, Red Bull, which is made in Austria but it's actually cheaper after it gets shipped to Germany than in the country it's made in. Insane. Austrians are being flogged. Germany feels like the only EU country with some sane competition in the retail sector.

a_bonobo• 3 years ago

The website has a 'Mueller' and a 'Mueller DE', I assume the first one is Mueller in Austria.

I've looked into doing something similar for Colesworths in AUS but they make scraping their websites very hard on purpose [1]. OP was lucky that they got the anonymous since-2017 price dump! I can't find anything similar for ANZ.

Pricehipster has some histories going back to 2021 for Coles alone: https://pricehipster.com/?stores=BkG5opaa

Interestingly, the cheap toast at Coles almost doubled in price since 2021. That fits with my general observations here: the general cheap staples got way more expensive, the expensive stuff stayed similar. https://pricehipster.com/product/Gwzex_LRGY2ueMAelqR-xg~BkG5...

[1] see https://pricehipster.com/woolworths-hostile for example

marginallen2• 3 years ago

You are hinting towards the bigger issue here. Yes, this guy has looked through the crack in the matrix, but the fact that inflation is impacting prices all over the western world directly and elsewhere indirectly has nothing to do with pricing shenanigans of the oligopolies.

These are issues that not even perfectly regulated and perfectly competitive markets could change, if that were even possible. These are systemic monetary, political, governmental issues.

I hate to break it to people, we are currently only in a lull where some may feel localized price increase pressure relief, but that is just a temporary condition.

The things that have been done, especially over the last several years, cannot be done without suffering the inevitable consequences, regardless of how much one did not consider them or wants to believe that they are starting to grip.

Unfortunately for people this is only the beginning of this roller coaster; and most here and in the subject mastodon thread are part of a social strata that is only affected in limited degrees. There are people who worked all their lives with a promise of a pension, only to find out that they get half of what some “refugee” and “immigrant” gets that hates them and is violating their indigenous society and culture. They have something like $/€1500/month and see their cost of living going up a compounded ~30% over five years while the government/pension masters keep promising an eventual 2% pension/retirement/social security increase.

selimthegrim• 3 years ago

Violating how, by drawing breath in some sacred precinct?

great_psy2• 3 years ago

What are the legal ramifications grocery stores can realistically get into ?

Are there any examples of stores getting in trouble in the past? Did it actually solve anything ? Obviously the stores are not scared of any ramifications.

lotsofpulp11• 3 years ago

What if grocery stores operate on very, very low profit margins, on the order of low single digit percentages, and hence if their vendors (including employees) increase prices, then they also have to increase prices (or else they go out of business), and that is why multiple grocery store businesses increase prices at the same time (because Nestle/Mondelez/etc are increasing prices for all of their buyers at the same time).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37534333

great_psy2• 3 years ago

Just to clarify, are you saying this is the excuse shops can use in front of a judge? or that OPs conclusion is actually wrong, and there is no collusion among shops to start with, just fair and square supply and demand ?

lostlastacc• 3 years ago

Only part i don't agree with is don't visit Austria. I had such a nice time there this summer, cant wait to go back.

And everything is so cheap compared to Swedish grocery stores ..

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

And everything is so cheap compared to Swedish grocery stores ..

Because wages are also much lower. I know some devs who bumped their wages considerably moving from Austria to Goteborg while also getting better QoL.

ahoka3• 3 years ago

I have checked a few things and everything other than milk and butter was more expensive in Austria (meat, flour, carrots). Do you have an example of what else is cheaper?

j7ake4• 3 years ago

Lots of comments here saying Germany is 30 percent cheaper than Austria.

Isn’t living in Vienna much cheaper than living in big cities in Germany like Berlin and Munich?

So overall it’s still a better deal to live in Vienna than in Munich.

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

Depends. Germany is a lot bigger than just Munich and Berlin.

There are cheaper places in Germany (NRW for example) where you can pay rent close or even less than Vienna while still benefiting from much cheaper products and let's not forget, the higher wages (there's no big tech nor big SW companies in Austria so tech wages are depressing).

So you're still better off in Germany, if wage/Col is your priority and not the history/culture/vibe and other such non-easily quantifiable things.

asyx• 3 years ago

Munich and Berlin (as well as Hamburg and I personally know people from Cologne that move away due to rent increasing heavily) are really expensive for German standards though. They're almost statistical outliers.

j7ake4• 3 years ago

But I’m comparing the most expensive city in Germany vs Austria so it’s a fair comparison.

bowsamic6• 3 years ago

Rent is expensive in Berlin for sure, but supermarkets are still way cheaper than Austria

boruto• 3 years ago

A lot better too. Rewe has ton of options and quality food compared to billa. But I think the supermarkets in germany are better than anywhere else in EU.

whyever• 3 years ago

Groceries are more expensive, but rent and salaries are lower than in Munich.

bowsamic6• 3 years ago

That's really shocking to me. Here in Germany the prices have gone up a bit but not hugely, and some things even went down a bit...

I_am_tiberius2• 3 years ago

I don't understand why people, at least in Vienna, go to alternative stores. There are so many small stores with much better food prices in Vienna. I guess prices need to rise even more until people change their behavior.

elAhmo• 3 years ago

Can you share some examples of such stores?

I_am_tiberius2• 3 years ago

If you live in the 2nd district, I can recommend this one (also, fruits/vegetables are much better than what is offered by the big supermarket chains): https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=16667717-d66d-49b1-ac8c-cc6fb...

dionys• 3 years ago

For me: - Birlik which is a turkish store for pretty good bread, vegetables, legumes - Wurstico for meat products - Brunnenmarkt for meat/veggies

quibus2• 3 years ago

Would be nice to have this for all EU countries.

jonasdegendt• 3 years ago

This already exists to some degree in the form of the HICP [0]. One of the categories in the index is food and they have a neat little tool where you can compare countries [1].

It doesn't cover every single product on shelves though, just a pre-selected set of products that's compared across all countries.

There's a myriad of datasets being collected and published by Eurostat.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/hicp/information-data [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...

amai2• 3 years ago

Eurostat has a food price monitoring tool:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...

quibus2• 3 years ago

Would be great to have the other EU countries added. Great for the consumer that is.

MandieD3• 3 years ago

Prices should be slightly higher in Austria, because the VAT (Mehrwertsteuer) is 20% for most consumer goods, and 10% for food, vs. Germany’s 19% and 7%, but not as outlandishly so as Mario’s data have shown.

For American readers: VAT is included in the shelf price, rather than tacked on at the register like sales taxes are in the US. Upside: fewer surprises at the register. Downside: it’s less visible.

the_mitsuhiko14• 3 years ago

Prices should be higher for a variety of reasons and they have historically already been higher. It's not just the VAT but particularly super market density, lack of competition on the market, general cost of doing business in the country.

This is a home made problem for the most part, but there is very little appetite to do something about it. Austria in many ways is drowning in very expensive regulation, has high taxation even for grocery store workers.

FirmwareBurner17• 3 years ago

Excuse me, but what expensive regulation and high grocery store workers' taxation are you talking about that's responsible for making prices so much higher than in Germany?

dkjaudyeqooe2• 3 years ago

Governments should mandate published prices for all goods sold in supermarkets, it would be good for competition and almost trivial for the companies to publish CSV files with barcode, price, start and end dates.

Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets, so I can imagine they would fight and lobby politicians vigorously.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

Is there not a EU-level research service that does this? I would be surprised if there is not something like the USDA's Economic Research Service, that has price data on virtually everything you can eat, going back 50 years.

atourgates• 3 years ago

Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets

I'm not sure this would be true, at least in the United States.

WalMart used to have a tool where you could scan your receipt in their app, they'd compare prices to competitors and if they found a lower price, you'd get a rebate.

It wasn't that popular or successful.

Can't find much info online, but here's an old discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/2x9ajh/walmart_app_...

dublinben• 3 years ago

Supermarkets seem like an undeserving target for this scrutiny. Profit margins for grocery stores are only 1-3%, so they're hardly engaging in price gouging. The average U.S. household spends less than 10% of its monthly budget on groceries and other food.[0] This number is half of what it was in the middle of the 20th Century, and probably lower than any time in history.[1]

[0] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget#food

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...

dkjaudyeqooe2• 3 years ago

They're also most likely to indulge in pricing shenanigans, as the article illustrates. It's not so much scrutiny as price transparency.

But I think it should apply to all larger retailers.

consp3• 3 years ago

This is true but housing cost has risen significantly (in percentage of spendable income) over time so there is an offset to play with here. You cannot take those basic costs alone.

stefan_• 3 years ago

This is what people keep repeating about ISPs - "look, they don't make any money!"

Yes, yes, you can offer a terrible service, stifle competition, ripoff customers and not make any money - all at the same time! Such is life in the local maximum.

65103• 3 years ago

Just do all retailers, for supermarkets it is easy to implement, many publish the prices already. The customer ends up paying for the implementation anyway therefore the question should be if the customer is interested enough in this "new" product. I cant imagine someone poor enough to not want to know where to shop?

OT I would take it much further: I want government to process all transactions and do VAT automatically. You upload the price of your jar of peanut butter, you upload my order of 10 jars, I pay though the government portal, the amount after taxes is deposited into the store's bank account.

Then we could do lame things like ration peoples liquor, the amount of weed they buy, increase the price of your 15th quarter pounder this week but also prevent people from buying all the toilet paper in all the stores. (why have such a convenient mechanism for foreign agents to turn a country into chaos?)

Besides getting rid of the slow, complicated, bureaucratic, expensive administrative burden of taxation and the fines that come with it it would enable very lame things many would oppose and they would be right to do so. That is, until rationing is needed for some reason. Then you have a robust system in place to do it.

I mean, I can easily buy all of the canned food from my local stores. Why would I leave any for you? I'm sure people would prefer it that way. When a real crisis arrives you'd really want to be spending your time on preventable side effects.

jonatron• 3 years ago

Here's monthly CSV's from the UK Office for National Statistics: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/data... Doesn't have barcodes though.

fbdab103• 3 years ago

That seems like a pretty significant limitation. Bulk entity matching is an art form outside of the scope of many. To enable meaningful comparisons, as many identifiers as possible need to be included.

noirbot• 3 years ago

This seems like an odd thing to state with such certainty. I'm not sure I see how it would be good for competition either - having worked for a grocery store before, management was generally aware of competitor's prices, at least at a "we send someone to every other competitor every few weeks to check prices on major important stuff". We were very open internally that we had the prices of a few items pegged to always be cheaper than any price Walmart had for them.

As stated other places in the thread, most grocery stores are super low margin overall. Especially on basic food items. Things like canned goods, basic cuts of meat, eggs, milk and the like were often sold at cost or even at a loss. Things that we actually had good margins on were mostly products where we had vertical integrations or special contracts with farms or factories - we were matching our competitors' prices, but at a better margin because we'd worked out how to pay less for the raw goods.

With all that in mind, I highly doubt how "disastrous" it would be to have a public price database. Sure, you could probably shave your pennies by spreading your shopping over 4-5 different stores because they're each slightly cheaper than each other, but you'd almost assuredly spend more in time and transportation costs to do that than you'd save.

What would cause the stores to lobby against it is that many stores, especially now, change prices on things pretty often. The CSV you imagine publishing to a government site is something that, as I recall, takes something like 5 hours to generate every night due to the vast variety of products across the company, and the fact that different stores in different areas may be pricing products differently or offering different coupons, or simply not stock the product at all. There is no one price per barcode universally across the company, so the outputted pricing list ends up being gigabytes of data.

wirthjason• 3 years ago

Anyone know what the US market (no pun intended) is like? Similar games, different ones?

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

Stop and Stop / Peapod has very aggressive bot detection (probably to prevent just this) so I doubt this would work; I tend to trip it "by accident" just browsing the site and get completely locked out until I clear my cookies.

jsdwarf3• 3 years ago

Fellow Austrian here. Nice price comparison project, but the elephant in the room is that grocery store prices in Germany are 20-40% lower for the same product. Explanation from the supermarket chains are shady at best (more stores per capita compared to Germany, they are forced to buy from more expensive Austrian distributors etc). I heard similar things from Belgium (higher prices than in France)

My point is: we need a Europe-wide price comparison if the situation should change.

the_mitsuhiko14• 3 years ago

Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation. It means that there are only a few players in that space that ultimately dominate it. Small companies could not even enter that space because the regulation does not give them any space to innovate (for instance free selection of products, other opening times).

paulmd• 3 years ago

More generally, the EU has problems with market efficiency in general. The law allowing mail-order businesses to refuse to sell across “state lines” means markets are very atomized and dominated by one or two players who, spoiler, don’t really compete aggressively on pricing.

The idea of Newegg refusing to sell to me because I don’t live in California is insane from an American perspective but that’s what the EU has to live with - mindfactory, komplett, etc will not ship across state lines. It’s a single market in name only, as far as distribution and sales. In practice the only “single market” is customs and currency, and even then there’s edge cases.

It is a very weird overall market where you have these strong consumer protections but also backed by low competitiveness in retail and distribution which leaves margins for supply chains to accommodate this.

dustfinger2• 3 years ago

Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation.

I feel that Canada has a similar problem.

mgbmtl• 3 years ago

Smaller countries (by economy or by population) tend to have protectionist rules, otherwise they simply get absorbed by their (bigger) neighbouring countries. Historically, those protections weren't that much of an issue, but as bigger countries continue optimizing their systems at huge scale, smaller countries can't keep up (offer the same price/quality).

For example in the US, when TikTok became too popular, politicians quickly reacted to avoid having a major social network that was backed by a foreign country. Legitimately in the name of consumer protection, of course, but clearly also other interests. Funny how the US very selectively protects its consumers.

It's not great for the consumer (less competition/freedom), but ultimately it's about protecting local expertise to avoid being fully dependant on another region (obviously, sometimes this gets abused). Losing local expertise increases the brain-drain, since any skilled person will know that they won't get many good job options locally.

I live in Quebec/Canada, which has many rules in the name of consumer protection, but usually it's really about protecting local businesses without going against free trade agreements. I'm not a fan of isolationism, but winner-take-all types of scenarios, where no one can compete against foreign semi-monopolies hurt us in the long term. It's hard to find a good balance. An interesting take, in Quebec and in the EU, is seeing many laws that only apply above a certain scale.

croes2• 3 years ago

Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation.

The same is said about Germany, so that can't be the reason.

momirlan3• 3 years ago

sounds like Canada

masswerk6• 3 years ago

We've seen some concentration over the last 30 years or so. It hasn't been about regulations, though. In actually, the remaining companies first aggressively extended their selections of products and lowered prices, only to backtrack significantly on both, as the competition was gone, with about 2 big conglomerates remaining.

Permit• 3 years ago

Explanation from the supermarket chains are shady at best

Do you suspect there is some other reason? Like, they can get away with it in Austria but not Germany? What’s a “non-shady” explanation in your eyes?

jsdwarf3• 3 years ago

It is indeed true that we have a lot of supermarkets in Austria, which might make logistics more expensive. But nobody ever explained why we need so many supermarkets from just 3 chains (REWE, Spar, Hofer - everything else is neglectedable). My only explanation is that the big 3 want to squat every possible spot to keep competition out. The other argument from the chains is that they are forced to buy brand products from Austrian distributors that are more expensive than German ones due to lack of volume (think of making a wholesale contract for M&Ms with Mars Germany, not Mars Austria). Again shady argument, because they could have sued against these practices years ago.

Germany has the luck of being a big country with scale effects and healthy grocery store competition.

paganel2• 3 years ago

Related, I’m currently in Greece and the price of locally produced peaches is higher here than the price of the same Greek-produced peaches is in Romania (from where I’m from). Noticed it today and it blew my mind, not sure how the people of Greece put up with this bs (the price of gasoline is also way higher).

oh_sigh• 3 years ago

Do they send lower quality peaches to Romania?

KeplerBoy3• 3 years ago

As an Austrian dev and consumer who has closely followed this throughout the year: it's soo frustrating to see how we're ripped off for no good reason, but nothing changes and nobody cares.

Hats off to Mario for sticking with the topic and not losing his mind over this infuriating madness.

fullstackchris• 3 years ago

not austrian but I live in austria. at first I was like, okay, higher inflation post covid like everything else, but now at this point where I see prices still rising, it's starting to just feel like a blatant cash grab

HOWEVER, i will add - what do people expect when you give everyone 500 extra EUR a year via this klima bonus? how is that supposed to reduce inflation? my guess is the grocery chains are leaning into this

piecerough• 3 years ago

What is this klima bonus?

harha• 3 years ago

That’s what you get when the population loves to be dependent on their government.

hathym• 3 years ago

greed and pursuit of increased profits is a good reason

KeplerBoy3• 3 years ago

Sure, those are the reasons, but I don't believe in Austrian exceptionalism.

Really curious what's special about the market here that allows companies to exploit the people like this.

happytiger2• 3 years ago

They would care of projects like this generated broad awareness and organized revolt from consumers.

Companies need adults in the room to keep them from behaving badly. This operating under the observation that they behave badly when not being watched, so a thesis to be tested more than an assertion of fact.

At a minimum they arguably behave worse when there are no consequences, hence inflation becoming air cover to raise prices when prices weren’t being raised before as there was no “good reason” for them to go up.

I love this project. “Index data” projects like this seem ripe as a category, especially with AI and Ml systems providing ready observability on changes and trends.

The question is how to get enough conclusions and salient observations that spur people to the social science outrage factor levels so that they take action.

Or perhaps we should just accept that companies will use these technologies to optimize everything against consumers and not deploy them in counterinsurgency resistance-style whitehat fashion.

peyton• 3 years ago

Is it possible for somebody to open up a shop that buys from German distributors at up to a 40% discount? Then you wouldn’t need a mass outrage movement to solve the problem.

gsich3• 3 years ago

Mostly because you have no choice.

cortesoft• 3 years ago

it's soo frustrating to see how we're ripped off for no good reason

It isn’t for no good reason, the prices are higher for the exact same reason they are lower in Germany: the price set allows the company to make the most money.

Whether prices are high or low, the reason is always exactly the same: it makes the most money.

savingsPossible• 3 years ago

so, just to reiterate: for no good reason

Sai_• 3 years ago

We recently had an Indian LinkedIn nutrition influencer literally reading the listed nutrition information on the back of a Bournvita* (a malt chocolate which you mix into milk) - dude got DMCA-ed and nearly sued. These companies get really worked up when you start affecting their bottomline.

*Might have been some other similar milk ~addictive~ (meant to say “additive” but the original version also works) for kids.

dom96• 3 years ago

It’s crazy how many interesting things you can find when scraping prices of services and products online (most of the time tricks that aim to screw the customer). I think it’s time the EU legislates that companies provide pricing data via a standardised API so that we can all benefit, and so these tricks are deterred.

I’ve actually built a scraper for Disney World holidays[1] and found some interesting hacks to get cheaper deals, for example purchasing separate hotel tickets lasting a part of the full stay. I plan to make a holiday inflation index out of this eventually.

1 - https://mousetrack.co.uk

curiousgal• 3 years ago

What's the point of posting in English if the meat of the content (the screenshots) is not in English?

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

The meat is the text. The screenshots are examples.

And you don't need to understand German to see that in one photo it's 1.99€ for 1L of detergent, and now 1.89€ for .8L of the same detergent.

raybb• 3 years ago

To gather wider attention from people speaking other languages.

Try1275• 3 years ago

Fellow Austrian here. I have send the link to some journalists and friends. I wonder how to make this actionable both to force politics to act upon this and for the consumer as well.

pbhjpbhj4• 3 years ago

If it's like the UK, there is so much "shrinkflation" (reduction in product size [and cheapening of ingredients]) that prices comparison is going to need per gram pricing. Identical looking packs now have extra air gaps: inflated chocolate bar wrappers, ice-cream cones with a 1cm gap below the lid, butter cartons have a recessed base, packages that formerly had straight sides now taper, etc. ... lots of these "tricks" already existed but they're being used more and more.

All the supermarkets have full inventory databases, they could send you an updated price list of every product every five minutes at basically no cost. This smacks of a legislature don't/won't seek advice from experts. It's a start I suppose.

switch0072• 3 years ago

that prices comparison is going to need per gram pricing

Not entirely sure what you mean here, but we do have per gram pricing requirements (expressed in £/KG).

EDIT: oh you mean that shrinkflation is so bad that £/gram will make more sense. Hah yeah

The trouble is that grocers have figured out that if you fool the population in to using a 'loyalty' card, you can make everything a 'promotional price' and avoid the per-unit labelling requirements. They just show the £/KG price of the higher price. So now consumers can't easily compare. [0]

All of this can be avoided by just shopping at e.g. Aldi and Lidl, but I would not be surprised if even they succumb to the temptation of a loyalty-card-only pricing very soon. (Though they too have partaken in shrinkflation)

[0] An example https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/296117381 . "£3.00 / £10.71/kg", but clubcard price is £2.00

bombcar• 3 years ago

Just make a law that says that all returns have to be paid out at the £/KG listed.

consp3• 3 years ago

The trouble is that grocers have figured out that if you fool the population in to using a 'loyalty' card, you can make everything a 'promotional price' and avoid the per-unit labelling requirements. They just show the £/KG price of the higher price. So now consumers can't easily compare. [0]

That is illegal in the Netherlands: You must advertise with the normal price. You can display the "promotional price" but it cannot be your main price. What they usually try is adding a "25% off with card" option next to it or with a second price card. You however CAN NOT be denied the discount in any way even if you do not subscribe! This is less easy to do online but offline the shop will have to give you the discount. There is one exception: b2b.

I complained about this when a liquor chain (gall & gall) started using their "card holder" prices as the regular prices on the cards and displayed the regular ones almost invisible (black text on blue background ...). They refused to provide the discount price to non card holders. Complained to the regulatory institution and got back to me that they were already looking into it. No fine was charged but the practice stopped after a few weeks.

edit: on a more HN note; if you use the apps for the discount of the stores they usually have an agree notice which includes, among other things, you can be tracked in the shop with the app. Never be logged in to those while in the shop (or ever).

joquarky• 3 years ago

It seems like we have all of the tools necessary to take a picture of a segment of store shelf and have the price data extracted from the photo, associated with the item itself, cross referenced, etc, and then show you an overlay with the best deals highlighted.

pbhjpbhj4• 3 years ago

Lidl/Aldi don't put their prices online, I think? But also, perhaps they change their prices more rapidly?

highwaylights• 3 years ago

In the UK the supermarkets (I assume they have to by law) quote the weight of contents of a single unit of product (which is supposed to be total weight - packaging weight), so you could analyse this quite rapidly.

gsich3• 3 years ago

I have seen this in Germany/Austria too, maybe it's EU wide.

pbhjpbhj4• 3 years ago

They don't, some items are per unit, which is a way that avoid comparisons for fruit. In [my local] Tesco they even took away the manual scales now, making comparison across 5 different types of apples, say, much harder. Good mental-arithmetic practice.

de6u99er• 3 years ago

I wish paying with the phone would not only transfer how much we paid where. I'd like to get more details like single item prices. This would enable us to track prices ourselves.

rolisz• 3 years ago

If you have loyalty/coupon apps for the store, sometimes they also give you digital receipts you can download. One day I will automate downloading the receipts and OCR-ing the items .

motohagiography• 3 years ago

The key point for me was the quote about asymetric information warfare, where it was impossible to know what the price of anything was until you were at the checkout. This used to be common on durable goods, professional services, and and big ticket items, but data science in retail has got it down to the micro level.

SenAnder3• 3 years ago

And this is why scraping is under technical and legal attack. To maintain their panopticon, where they see all, while you get only a pinhole view of, in this case, the economy.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

Scraping is huge business for people who don’t have your best interests in mind, too. There are many businesses built on the idea of gathering as much of people’s data as they can find in the public internet and selling it to anyone willing to pay.

Contrary to what many people thing, Facebook, Google, and other companies do not sell your data! They are ad companies that use their private data to target ads, but they aren’t selling it to 3rd parties likely many people have been led to believe. This has created a market opening for nefarious companies to scrape these websites, compile the data, and sell it to everyone from police to governments to spammers.

I’m not saying there’s a right answer to regulation, but it’s incorrect to say that scrapers are always the good actors championing the public’s best interests.

SenAnder3• 3 years ago

And cameras are used by stalkers as well. But when a prolific photographer, growing rich off their trade, tries to control what others are allowed to photograph, I won't assume they're doing it out of concern for my well-being.

I don't want Google or Facebook to have my data either, yet they've done their best to gather everyone's with various trackers, not just data posted voluntarily to their platforms. They don't have to sell it - they are the threat too.

ethbr13• 3 years ago

Scraping is huge business for people who don’t have your best interests in mind, too.

I liked how the thread observed that competitor supermarkets were rapidly converging prices on adjustments.

And assumed this meant collusion.

Why collude when you can just hire grey-market high frequency scrapers to detect your competitors' repricing and trigger your own?

dylan604• 3 years ago

Facebook, Google, and other companies do not sell your data!

this does not excuse the pervasive tracking that occurs by "we collect for internal purposes only" vs "we sell to anyone". an invasion of privacy is still an invasion of privacy whether they do it for their own fetish purposes or distributing it to the public.

gdulli• 3 years ago

They absolutely do sell your data, they just launder it through various ad tech obfuscations to achieve a veneer of anonymization.

Fervicus• 3 years ago

Someone needs to make something like this for Canada.

etler• 3 years ago

I took the thing down in fear of retaliation by the grocery chains. My plan: get a big NGO, news outlet or political party to host the thing and be a legal shield for the endevour.

Imagine how much good could be done in the world if developers could create things for the common good without fear of corporate legal retaliation.

vitro2• 3 years ago

I was pondering about an idea for an app that will crowdsource prices of items and their development in the time. You know, to be aware when there is some product discount, but during the discount period, the original price is higher that usual which means customer is being mislead.

This practice, although prevalent, is not legal in EU [1]

The app would let you track prices for products in individual stores by scanning their EANs. You could see price development and website could show stores that use unfair pricing.

Seems doable to me but I may be missing some technical challenges that would come with implementing this approach.

[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...

Void_• 3 years ago

I don’t know about rest of EU, but here in Slovakia, every receipt has a QR code.

You can send that number to API for receipt verification - and it returns all line items and prices.

If we could get people to scan the receipts (expense tracking for example) we would have massive amount of crowdsourced data.

Wish I had time to pursue this idea!

vitro2• 3 years ago

Interesting! That would make things way easier.

Another feature that comes to my mind is setting up watches for products you are interested in. Especially for people who need to watch every expense, this could come very handy.

Yes, time..

folmar2• 3 years ago

This is not the case in most EU.

Also note that it'll also make a even bigger tracking mechanism than having a centralised API in the first place.

For example the QR-code bearing receipts from Germany have a signed proof of commiting the transaction to HSM, but not the details.

Online-capable cash registers in Poland submit only hourly statistics centrally.

ephbit• 3 years ago

It would be the easiest thing to give customers a csv table of the purchased items *directly* in the QR code on the receipt (instead of just a link to some website, where you can download the table as pdf of what). Then people could load it into their app or software and analyze their own data and shopping behavior.

Of course the retailers will never do this.

As Mario writes, the essential thing with this whole topic is:

If I were trying to describe it in more flowerly terms: It's asymmetric information war fare. [1]

The way for companies to increase their margins is: remove price transparency so people effectively cannot compare anymore.

It's the same concept everywhere: the higher the complexity of the system, the harder it will be for the individual to optimize for their own benefit. Big entities on the other hand, such as big companies CAN deal with complexity and still optimize for their benefit.

Take away message: people should always be cautious of additional complexity creeping into systems. It usually benefits the big actors, at the expense to the individual.

[1] https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071588108514123

posix86• 3 years ago

Shoutout to Switzerland's amazon, Galaxus & Digitec, who show price development graphs out of the box

IG_Semmelweiss• 3 years ago

CCC(camel camel camel) extension was doing that for amazon products and related webpages i believe

In these days that all grocers are going e-store, its only a matter of time

ro-_-b3• 3 years ago

I lived in Austria and in Germany and it's 100% true, prices in supermarkets are significantly higher in Austria even for products produced in Austria.

The reasons IMO are: * less price sensitivity: German people are extremely price sensitive, they discuss and compare prices all the time. In Austria people care way less about this on average. Supermarkets take advantage * higher logistics costs: population density in Austria is less than in Germany. Furthermore, many supermarkets are located in areas hard to reach like mountain areas. Higher logistic costs translate to higher prices * VAT is slightly higher in Austria * unqualified labor that works in supermarkets and logistics makes slightly more money in Austria than in Germany * there indeed is a higher supermarket tensity in Austria than in Germany. Supermarkets of the same company appear more appealing in Austria than in Germany: nicer presentation of food, cleaner, way less people in the line waiting. All this makes them more expensive

For all these reasons mentioned above prices are higher. I argue it's mostly related to consumer choices. If they would care so much about prices and so little about esthetics as in Germany then prices would come down. If people would start to walk the extra mile for the cheaper supermarket prices would come down.

wholesomepotato• 3 years ago

If we all lived in tents, cost of living would go down.

It's silly. If you can afford not having to worry only about the price, congratulate yourself and enjoy it.

ro-_-b3• 3 years ago

Also important to note:

Germany is a car country: most ways to work, gym, etc in the average German city are done by car. Makes it easy to drive the extra mile to the cheapest supermarket.

Austria is much better for using public transport or the bike. In this case you won't make the extra way to stop at the cheapest grocery. And in the areas in Austria where people use cars population density is so low that not a lot of competition between supermarkets exists

kiney• 3 years ago

Not true. Most people in germany have a supermarket in walking distance to their home and the bime infrastructe is often critizised but actually good compared to most cou tries

stewbrew2• 3 years ago

Funny comment. You should tell this the Austrian chancellor.

Grimburger• 3 years ago

Looked this up in 30 seconds rather than relying on the ever-common HN anecdote with a certain narrative:

Germany has 627 per 1000 capita.

Austria has 572 per 1000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

And here's distance traveled by car in each country, again, basically identical:

https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-secto...

qwertox• 3 years ago

Today at Aldi I saw a pudding [0] which I was about to grab, until I saw the price. 1.88€ for 500ml. My first thought was that I'm paying 1.90 for a VPS which gives me a static IPv4, 1 vCore, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD and unlimited bandwidth (40 TB unthrottled, 100mbit/s throttled). How does this even relate in terms of value? I would have expected something below 80ct, but some of the prices which products have, have become really absurd. It's as if they're just doing a "let's set it to this price and see if it sticks".

Even funnier was the fact that they now have Christmas products on the shelves, "Wintertraum Lebkuchen". Then again, I read a Reddit post some months ago which explained why they're doing this (might as well put it there instead of into storage).

[0] https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/p.dr-oetker-kirschgruetze-oder-s...

jpoel• 3 years ago

Which provider offers such a cheap VPS?

momirlan3• 3 years ago

same is true for Canada vs USA. always more expensive products, and less selection in Canada.

refurb• 3 years ago

This goes beyond just groceries. I've lived in a few countries that vary in population from hundreds of millions to just a few million and the impact of scale is very noticeable.

It's very intuitive, but the actual impact is eye opening. I've found that for almost all products and services, the size of the US results in far more companies offering said product/service, which results in a lot more competition and better prices.

You see it not just across consumer items, but things like financial services.

masswerk6• 3 years ago

Nothing of this changed in the last two years, though. So this hardly serves an explanation for the current price hikes.

stewbrew2• 3 years ago

You should add conglomerates. In Austria, the grocery market is effectively dominated by 3 companies. They rarely compete directly, i.e., by having stores next to each other.

berkes2• 3 years ago

The same in the Netherlands vs Germany. I live on the border. And often German grocery stores have (organic) vegetables, produced in the Netherlands, for much less than these same vegetables cost in the Netherlands.

Part is VAT, which is higher in the Netherlands, but I'm confident most is due to the fact Dutch people will simply pay more than Germans.

fesc• 3 years ago

But on the other hand it seems that produce is of higher quality in NL on average than in DE.

DelightOne• 3 years ago

How do you get cheaper prices when they follow each others' price increases?

standardUser• 3 years ago

I'm not sure how other mastodon servers look, but this one is light years ahead of Twitter in terms of readability. I hope someone eventually writes a tell-all book about exactly what was wrong with that company and its approach to product design.

WinLychee• 3 years ago

Different incentives. A publically traded corporation with thousands of workers trying to grow in perpetuity, has different goals than a community project. While the former has more resources, the latter is more mission driven.

timeon2• 3 years ago

This is default Mastodon look I think. But one can use separate front-ends as well.

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

That's default Mastodon styling "dark mode" and single-pane.

There's also a multi-pane "advanced view", similar to Tweetdeck, I'm told.

The dark mode is preferred by some but is absolute hell to read on an e-ink device. I have an outstanding issue request on that, as the theme cannot be changed if you're not logged in to a given instance.

croes2• 3 years ago

Maybe the immense task for such a database isn't technical but to get the grocery chains on board.

poorbutdebtfree• 3 years ago

If rampant inflation is what it takes to go full blown socialism ("you'll own nothing and you'll like it") then so be it.

NKosmatos• 3 years ago

I wanted to do something similar for Greek supermarkets but I never had the time. Great to see something is available and I don’t have to rediscover the wheel.

The situation with inflation, prices, interest rates and the whole state of the European/global economy is so f**ed up that only with tools like this one we can expose what is happening in the market

hsuduebc2• 3 years ago

In Czechia. Your poor neighbor is it exactly the same. Discounts. Consumer behavior. Bigger prices than in Germany and retailers making idiots from their customers.

amai2• 3 years ago

Eurostat has a food price monitoring tool:

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...

hnwizard• 3 years ago

tl;dr it's a scam.

Austria, is a zone of experimentation for large German companies like T-Mobile, REWE and friends.

Longer explanation, the bottom line is that they can do it and get away with it, why and how are just excuses and cause for infinite talk on the subject. They are allowed to get away with it, and so they will do it, basic economics.

rant/ The same applies to literally the entire world now. With the "new world order" after COVID prices for literally everything have been on the rise, with ample excuses to justify this. Then the "war" in Ukraine came along and gave the greedy in the world yet another new set of excuses to justify increased prices.

Sure, there could have been rational justification to increase costs temporarily, but long term, it feels like a global, coordinated scam.

Take energy prices in Germany and Austria for example. The energy companies were literally given the green light to scam the populace by dramatically hiking the price of fuel, and electricity.

The cost of petrol and diesel almost doubled, the price of electricity (even though MOST of it is made from rivers flowing, therefore with no significant increase in underlying cost to generate) was more than doubled in some cases and kept this way for many, many months.

So since petrol and power now costs double, we can increase all the rest to go along with it, right? Sure, let's do it!

Yeah, the politicians started yammering about how they'll tax these extra profits but the bottom line will be that all of these huge corps will get away with it, and they'll run away with tons of profits that they were never supposed to have.

Are we ever going to go down to pre-war/pre-covid costs and prices? my estimate is that it's highly unlikely and never going to happen. With minor ups and downs on the way to keep us happy and talking, pricing is only going to be trending one way, up.

Way to go our fantastic, democratically elected officials. You guys are so talented, smart and you really seem to care about your people. Give us more of this goodness please, we can't wait! We're going to elect you or your talented replacements as well next time, don't worry about it!

The world is turning into Idiocracy fast, and the speed at which its heading there is only accelerating.

/rant

ferfumarma• 3 years ago

The most amazing thing is the suggestion of price collusion given the 1-cent changes in price from store to store that perfectly match one another.

Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

Related Stories