11 ms·
Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites
- michaelhoney 3y agoThis is a great thread, and it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens.
- FirmwareBurner 3y 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.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoIf 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?
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoMy guess is because in Germany they're taking a loss due to actual competition, and making it up in other countries like Austria where they rake in higher profits than in their home-land.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoSo anti-competitive practices are the norm in Austria but no one would dare try it in Germany? Truly bizarre theory.
- manmal 3y agoMatter of fact is that crossing the border to Germany will make your shopping 30+% cheaper. Make of that what you will, but it’s the same companies (Rewe, Aldi, Lidl).
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoLiterally no possible way Austrian grocery stores are pulling in 43% margins. That's more than Apple makes. I can't tell if this price fixing talk is the product of overactive imaginations or a gigantic lack of imagination. If grocery stores were suddenly capable of 43 percent margins there would be absolute pandemonium in the markets and stocks would skyrocket. Retailers in every industry would be switching to food sales en masse. People would be flying food in by aircraft. You see just the opposite. Food retailers' stocks are down a lot year-to-date.
- manmal 3y agoThere is a lot of cross border shopping, both online and offline, so, yeah. You seem to severely underestimate shipping costs though. For perishable goods, of which you buy max €30 every few days, you’d pay at least €10 express shipping fees. And then you have no control over which pieces you‘ll get (hard avocados & soft apples). Also, shipping heavy stuff like sparkling water crates is obviously prohibitively expensive.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoShipping costs are price fixing now? We're talking about the brain dead price fixing theory. Stay on topic. I'm not the one underestimating shipping costs. The theorists are.
- orangepurple 3y agoStock prices have nothing really to do with the company itself. Stock is issued by companies, but the value of a stock is proportional to the expected future hype value of the stock. Given sufficient hype, more people will buy in to it after you buy it, and the unit price of the limited stock issue goes up. Stock picking is simply gambling for retail investors which have zero say in how a company is run.
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoAccording to the conspiracy theory, investors would see HUGE profit margins and they wouldn't rebalance their portfolio to get in on that? Why does the conspiracy theory rely on all investors being completely immune to earnings and allergic to profits? Why are earnings reports such a massive deal normally but in the grocery business nobody cares? Or why would investors assume that the huge earnings are very temporary and do not improve the longer-term outlook? The amount of cope in this thread is truly unfathomable. Just straight up economic illiteracy.
- orangepurple 3y agoStocks crash on bad earnings reports because the future attractiveness of the stock has diminished. This reduces the likelihood that a future investor will buy your hot potato above the unit price they bought in. Stocks are fundamentally divorced from economic reality EXCEPT when a company ceases trading and several other rare administrative actions. Predicting future hype is all that matters. Or time spent fractionally invested in all broader casino hype trains, e.g. VTI
- iraqmtpizza 3y agoWhy in the motherfuck would it be a bad earnings report when, according to this conspiracy theory, gross margins on food would have gone from 1% to 43%? Conservatively that would lead to a ten thousand percent increase in the stock price. Yet instead the stocks of Metro AG and SPAR Group, Inc. are down 25 or more percent YTD.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y 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.
- lxgr 3y agoGerman-only [1], but Google Translate gets the gist of it [2]. [1] https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1684683/index.html https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1684683/index.html [2] https://helpv2-orf-at.translate.goog/stories/1684683/index.html?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=eo&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://helpv2-orf-at.translate.goog/stories/1684683/index.h...
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoIf we are talking about that story, that is 12 years ago, not 6 and relates to a different fee structure, not raising of prices. So while I agree that this is a terrible development, I'm not sure that's what we're discussing here. More specifically after 2011 there was a huge downwards pressure on the market coming from increasing competition from virtual operators with decreasing prices.
- lxgr 3y ago> relates to a different fee structure, not raising of prices Are you really arguing that all operators introduced a yearly fee of exactly the same amount, and in a very short period of time, was somehow perfectly balanced out by a drop in monthly rates, and on average nobody ended up paying more? Yes, Austria in general has a very healthy competitive market for mobile phone plans, but this particular move just looks extremely coordinated.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago> Are you really arguing that all operators introduced a yearly fee of exactly the same amount, and in a very short period of time, was somehow perfectly balanced out by a drop in monthly rates, and on average nobody ended up paying more? I'm arguing that after 2011 when the first operator introduced those fees, the cost of mobile phone plans decreased for many years until around 2019. It's also that not all operators introduced those fees and not all operators did at the same time. The main reason why many operators started charging with this fee structure is pretty obvious: it makes the monthly cost appear lower than it is. It's a form of sanctioned price in-transparency. //EDIT: the main reason for the introduction of that Servicepauschale was that for a while internet service providers where required to participate in the now illegal "Vorratesdatenspeicherung". The pauschale was generally understood to cover the cost of the infrastructure for it.
- lxgr 3y 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).
- jsdwarf 3y agoIts very common for people from Salzburg/Austria to shop in the Berchtesgaden region, however with bigger distances from the border this doesn't make sense. Re Austrian products cheaper abroad than in Austria - there was the curious case of a beer drink from Gösser, that was sold cheaper 700km away from the brewery in Berlin than in the town of the brewery itself: https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/photo/1 https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/phot.... Gösser argued they wanted to promote the drink in Germany against local competition and that this was a temporary price drop. Again, Germany made a smarter move by developing beer powder concentrate (https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neuzelle-alkohol-wann-supermarkt-transport-kosten-sparen-wasser-brandenburg-zr-92174347.html https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neu... German). This allows them to remove the 90% water share of the beer when exporting it to Asia and still sell it as "brewed in Germany".
- nebula8804 3y agoWow it feels as if you are writing about the US. Guess "the grass is always greener" and all that.
- gsich 3y 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.
- parineum 3y 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.
- midasuni 3y ago“asymmetric information warfare” I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIt 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 3y agoAssuming 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
- lotsofpulp 3y ago>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? I have no reason to assume that simply because you tell me something may have sold for $10 in the past, that it has any bearing on the relative utility per dollar of that item in the present. I only look at the price I would be able to buy at, and search a few other retailers on my phone, and determine if it is an acceptable price. People prefer discounted items because of ego. They like to feel like THEY got a deal.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
- MichaelRo 3y ago[flagged]
- midasuni 3y agoSupermarkets are colluding to increase prices as all companies are wont to do. There isn’t enough competition to act as downward pressure on prices. This isn’t a monetary thing that YouTube says - the goods a few miles away in Germany aren’t seeing this, despite being in the same currency and no difficulty transporting them. In a free market a competitor would buy from the same supplier the german supermarket does, undercut the competition and force all prices for. However that doesn’t work because consumers in Austria don’t realise how they are being ripped off, because while the large corporation has all the data to manipulate and extract maximum revenue from each consumers the consumer lacks the data to do the opposite.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago>However that doesn’t work because consumers in Austria don’t realise how they are being ripped off Oh, they have known for a long time they were being ripped off but didn't have the proof. There's nothing they can do about it because the corrupt politicians claim it's just the free market and can't intervine with the market pricing otherwise it would be communism, and Austrian consumers who don't live close to Germany have no other options for shopping than the local monopoly.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIs there any evidence that Austrian supermarket owners have long reaped outsize profit margins?
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThere is evidence that the prices they charge in Austria are often significantly higher than in Germany, meaning higher profits per sale, at the expense of the consumer who's wages are lower than those in Germany, so it's a double whammy.
- j7ake 3y agoTo check price of items in Austria, the website is here: https://heisse-preise.io/ 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_pc 3y agoYou 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-dude 3y agoThat is ridiculous expensive for peanuts.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoOn 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.
- jefftk 3y agoIn Boston I see basically the same: dry roasted peanuts at $3.49 for a pound, cheaper if you buy more at once.
- the-dude 3y agoNL: house brand supermarket : e1,80/500g ( or less ), roasted salted.
- yurishimo 3y agoTbf the Dutch love pinda’s. I not convinced people don’t bathe in sate sauce it’s so cheap.
- living_room_pc 3y agoHad 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 3y agoOne 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 3y agoNow in Poland every promotion needs to display lowest price for the product in last 30 days l, effectively countering this strategy.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWow, I love Poland now.
- anotherhue 3y agoThat's a whole EU thing I think. We have it in Ireland. https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treatment/unfair-pricing/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
- Culonavirus 3y ago
- 0xDEF 3y agoFunny 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.
- helpfulContrib 3y agoAustrian 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.
- 0xDEF 3y agoPro-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.
- helpfulContrib 3y agoThis doesn't make any sense at all. Please explain it without generalizations, and maybe give some examples?
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI guess what he meant was that big retailers colluded to increase prices simultaneously together in lock-step for no reason other than greed and profiteering, and simply blamed it on the Russo-Ukrainian war as being the reason for prices exploding.
- helpfulContrib 3y agoI believe the OP was referring to Far-right, pro-Russia parties getting their 'come-uppance' by the rest of the world, but I'd really like to know more details about that. Not that I doubt that big corporations would use the Russia excuse whenever/wherever they can - I mean, who wouldn't - but I'd just like to see the details that tie the inflation to support of Russia a bit more clearly laid out.
- derelicta 3y agoTruly shows how Free Markets are the most efficient
- jiofj 3y agoThat's nice if we forget about the ECB printing money like there's no tomorrow.
- dangerwill 3y agoCapitalism can't fail it can only be failed
- ta1243 3y agoWhich explains why inflation in countires like Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Luxembourg are all under 2.5% as they famously don't use the Euro.
- jiofj 3y agoAs someone in Spain: those numbers are absolutely fake.
- Infinitesimus 3y ago(That's the point they're trying to make btw)
- midasuni 3y agoI obe it when something doesn’t fit a narrative so it’s decried as “fake news”
- wiredfool 3y agoDenmark, yes, but the others use the euro.
- manmal 3y ago
- LUmBULtERA 3y agoThis 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?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoAnother 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-dude 3y agoPotatos ( 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.
- tasogare 3y ago[dead]
- mthoms 3y agoI'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-dude 3y agoWhat I understood from actual farmer : fuel and fertilizer.
- bowsamic 3y agoI'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 3y agoYou 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€.
- bowsamic 3y ago
- SushiHippie 3y ago[dupe]
- SushiHippie 3y agoDiscussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37530314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37530314
- dang 3y agoYou'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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364619
- SushiHippie 3y agoWow, thank you!
- thih9 3y agoThe 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37530314
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoYeah, that title was very uninspired. Especially that probably some don't know where Austria is on the map.
- l0b0 3y 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 https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise/forks
- zwarag 3y agoHe 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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoMost 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.
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoRed Bull is not made in Austria, at least not necessarily. The European company is headquartered there, but its business model is largely just owning the IP. The filling of Red Bull cans is outsourced to Rauch, which produces at least some of the product in Switzerland.
- barrkel 3y agoFamously cheap Switzerland. I get the feeling that the same tricks are being played in Switzerland. Coop and Migros feel a lot like a duopoly, and discounts also cyclical. Not unusual to see 40% discount on outrageously overpriced detergents, for example. I do most of my shopping in Germany.
- great_psy 3y agoWhat 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.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoWhat 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37534333
- great_psy 3y agoJust 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 ?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoBased on retail stores' long history of miniscule profit margins, there is no evidence of collusion among shops.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lostlastacc 3y agoOnly 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 ..
- FirmwareBurner 3y 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.
- ahoka 3y agoI 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?
- j7ake 3y agoLots 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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoDepends. 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 3y agoMunich 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.
- j7ake 3y agoBut I’m comparing the most expensive city in Germany vs Austria so it’s a fair comparison.
- bowsamic 3y agoRent is expensive in Berlin for sure, but supermarkets are still way cheaper than Austria
- boruto 3y agoA 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.
- bowsamic 3y agoThat'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_tiberius 3y agoI 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 3y agoCan you share some examples of such stores?
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoIf 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-cc6fbacce881&cp=48.222914~16.398296&lvl=16&style=h&pi=0&imgid=b332e994-d2c4-4f25-b139-fe65e03668a0&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027 https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=16667717-d66d-49b1-ac8c-cc6fb...
- dionys 3y agoFor me: - Birlik which is a turkish store for pretty good bread, vegetables, legumes - Wurstico for meat products - Brunnenmarkt for meat/veggies
- quibus 3y agoWould be nice to have this for all EU countries.
- jonasdegendt 3y agoThis 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 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/hicp/information-data [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-price-monitoring/ https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...
- amai 3y agoEurostat has a food price monitoring tool: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-price-monitoring/ https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...
- quibus 3y agoWould be great to have the other EU countries added. Great for the consumer that is.
- MandieD 3y agoPrices 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_mitsuhiko 3y agoPrices 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.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoExcuse 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?
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoIn Germany while the taxes for a typical full time grocery store worker would be higher, Germany has an extraordinary amount of "mini jobber" working in grocery stores which drives down the cost. Expensive regulation is for instance the Ladenzeitgesetz which restricts a retailer to a regulated number of hours a week with very little freedom to operate the business. Stores need to close before 9, are only allowed to open Saturdays until 18:00 and are restricted to 72 hours total a week and no Sunday trading. Additionally they are subject to very stringent rules and requirements that are untypical to grocery stores in the rest of the European Union from before they can even open a store (Betriebsanlagengenehmigung). The end result is an incredible expensive market with very little competition compared to Germany.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoGovernments 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 3y agoIs 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 3y 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_scan_your_receipt_and_get_money_back/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/2x9ajh/walmart_app_...
- dublinben 3y agoSupermarkets 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 https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget#food [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-share-of-income-spent-on-food-in-the-united-states-remained-relatively-steady-from-2000-to-2019/ https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
- wirthjason 3y agoAnyone know what the US market (no pun intended) is like? Similar games, different ones?
- KennyBlanken 3y agoStop 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.
- jsdwarf 3y agoFellow 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.
- Permit 3y 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?
- jsdwarf 3y agoIt 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.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoAustria'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).
- 3y ago
- KeplerBoy 3y agoAs 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 3y agonot 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
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- piecerough 3y agoWhat is this klima bonus?
- ethbr1 3y agohttps://www.klimabonus.gv.at/en/ https://www.klimabonus.gv.at/en/
- KeplerBoy 3y agoIt's a nice little scheme that incentivizes saving CO2. There's a CO2 tax on gas and other fossil fuels, part of this tax revenue is then, once a year, distributed back to taxpayers. The idea is that people who don't consume a lot of fossil fuel earn money through this scheme, while those who user above average pay more than what they get back. Of course this is not well communicated from the gov and random cash appearing in everyone's account can accelerate the already high inflation.
- dom96 3y agoIt’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 https://mousetrack.co.uk
- curiousgal 3y agoWhat's the point of posting in English if the meat of the content (the screenshots) is not in English?
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoThe 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 3y agoTo gather wider attention from people speaking other languages.
- Try1275 3y agoFellow 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.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoIf 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.
- switch007 3y 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 https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/296117381 . "£3.00 / £10.71/kg", but clubcard price is £2.00
- bombcar 3y agoJust make a law that says that all returns have to be paid out at the £/KG listed.
- consp 3y 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).
- de6u99er 3y agoI 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 3y agoIf 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 3y agoThe 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.
- SenAnder 3y agoAnd 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 3y agoScraping 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.
- SenAnder 3y agoAnd 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.
- ethbr1 3y 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?
- 3y ago
- Fervicus 3y agoSomeone needs to make something like this for Canada.
- etler 3y 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.
- vitro 3y agoI 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-treatment/unfair-pricing/index_en.htm https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
- Void_ 3y agoI 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!
- vitro 3y agoInteresting! 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..
- folmar 3y agoThis 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 3y agoIt 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 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071588108514123
- ro-_-b 3y agoI 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 3y agoIf 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-_-b 3y agoAlso 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 3y agoNot 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
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- standardUser 3y agoI'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 3y agoDifferent 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- timeon 3y agoThis is default Mastodon look I think. But one can use separate front-ends as well.
- dredmorbius 3y agoThat'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.
- croes 3y agoMaybe the immense task for such a database isn't technical but to get the grocery chains on board.
- poorbutdebtfree 3y agoIf 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 3y agoI 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 3y agoIn Czechia. Your poor neighbor is it exactly the same. Discounts. Consumer behavior. Bigger prices than in Germany and retailers making idiots from their customers.
- amai 3y agoEurostat has a food price monitoring tool: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-price-monitoring/ https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...
- hnwizard 3y agotl;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
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ferfumarma 3y agoThe 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.