[dupe]

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

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

Wow, thank you!

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

This submission did, because of its more descriptive title and the mention of scraping.

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

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

Would be nice to have this for all EU countries.

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...

Eurostat has a food price monitoring tool:

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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_...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Well if they refuse you can't really force them, they might have legitimate reasons to turn clients away but I agree that this is not efficient and since you cited mindfactory I add that in Italy in the hardware business there have been many popular companies with competitive prices that were shut down by authorities for tax evasion.

Austria in particular is really bad here. If you send commercially packages into Austria you need to register with the recycling system, license packaging and go to a notary to declare a proxy for packaging. There is so much crazy protectionism going on that the single market is effectively no longer free.

This is similar to other countries unfortunately. And don't ask about food product labelling.

>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.

It's obviously not as conducive to business as in the US. However, one advantage I can think of is that registering a new business in Canada takes only about a day.

I should add that I don't know much about regulations in either country. I would love to start a similar opensource project for Canada. I am very curious about what we might find.

we know of the price gouging and all oligopolistic behaviour in Canada, but there is no political will to do anything. big business and government are buddies.

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.

> 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.

What happened to TikTok in the US?

Instead of the US three-letter agencies having everyone's location, friend groups, bio-metric info, personal photos, etc.. via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.. ByteDance was getting all the data and sharing with the CCP.

So Trump and others tried to ban it or make ByteDance sell the app to a US company.

Honestly, I was kind of okay with that. As much as I hate western governments spying on us, I hate that fascist and communist countries like China, NK, and many places in the middle east literally act to ban, imprison or 'disappear' millions of it's own people that have tried to speak again the party lines.

Maybe one day even the western countries will do this. Governments are hands down the leading cause of death in the world.

But as far as I know, nothing changed, and

> politicians quickly reacted to avoid having a major social network that was backed by a foreign country.

Politicians did not do anything to change this.

Yeah, since the ban started with one party - the other party worked to block it. Eventually it all fizzled out.

It's kind of how politics work in our country since we only have two parties.

> 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.

Germany has a market 10 times as large and in some ways better regulation.

sounds like Canada

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.

> 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?

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.

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).

Do they send lower quality peaches to Romania?

I think all peaches sent far away are lower quality than nearby peaches since they need to be picked too early to account for travel time.

These Greek peaches are indeed bigger, as in, apple-big, but not sure that that “quality” can justify the price difference (they’re twice as expensive in Greece). And the smaller peaches taste better anyway, like it’s usually the case with fruits and “bigness”.

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.

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

Personally, I'm not seeing food prices still rising (as of this summer.) Based on my shopping experience, the most extreme price increases have been in bread, then eggs. Price of beer has been relatively stable.

Now my rent on the other hand... we're paying 20% more in rent per month than we were a year ago (same apartment.) So the increase in cost of groceries doesn't bother me by comparison.

What is this klima bonus?

It'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.

Bit of a fail to do it once yearly. Quarterly or monthly would make more sense…

That's also going to increase the price of goods due to the CO2 tax on goods production and distribution.

But with the klima distribution it evens out. People who consume more will lose and people who consume less will win.

KlimaBonus is made in such a way that people who consume more get more.

It looks like it's designed so that people who live in the country get more, not necessarily those who consume more. Within a region, everyone gets the same amount. So within a region, those who consume less win, and those who consume more lose.

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

greed and pursuit of increased profits is a good reason

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.

They proved Austria has the problem. They didn't prove it's exceptional.

Imagine if we could exploit everyone everywhere like this!

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.

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.

I would suggest that AI tech will open up more arbitrage opportunities for retailers as their price strategies come under pressure from inexpensive monitoring and reporting. Already I’ve worked on prototypes where shopping lists are fed into the system and the retailer that would give you the lowest price nearby is suggested.

Imagine the optimization possibilities where you have shared borders like you’re talking about, or where digital intelligence can be injected to optimize purchase prices among consumers for larger ticket or recurring items.

A lot of room for new and better strategies here.

Mostly because you have no choice.

> 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.

so, just to reiterate: for no good reason

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.

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

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

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.

To gather wider attention from people speaking other languages.

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.

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.

[delayed]

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

> 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).

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.

It's illegal to scrape databases in the EU.

huh? Is that real?

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

Aldi appear to list the prices, perhaps just a subset, I'm not sure: https://groceries.aldi.co.uk/

I shop there 2-3 times a week and wouldn't really say "rapidly". Or if they do, the swings aren't big enough for me to notice.

Though looking at their site, I think they are partaking in the old "raise prices for a short period then show them as a 'sale' price" nonsense. But it only seems to be £0.10-£0.30 and the higher prices aren't even that offensive (yes I have a soft spot for Aldi :D).

I would like to see companies forced to show the period that the higher price was charged for.

My local Aldi (London) has e-ink shelf end labels now, so they are at least preparing to change prices more rapidly.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

Looking at supermarket (or any) prices, publicly posted, in-store or online, is not remotely grey market.

Scraping them with high fidelity and frequency, and then selling that data commercially... and then buying that data from a provider and updating your prices using them...

Probably isn't something a company with potential monopoly concerns (read: Walmart et al.) would want be be overly open about.

I haven't seen one in a while, but this sort of thing used to go off the rails on amazon. I tried to buy a 10 trillion dollar chair--presumably algorithmically priced--but the checkout process broke before I could see what the CC company would say about it.

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

What the thread actually said is this:

> My guess was: tacit collusion, meaning, oligopolic price coordination without explicit coordination.

Which is what you described.

>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.

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

Someone needs to make something like this for Canada.

>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.

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...

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!

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..

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

even if supermarkets are within walking distance, if Germans are getting in their cars regularly for other reasons, that could change their supermarket shopping behavior in favor of more distant store with cheaper prices.

exactly. While living in Germany I had an expensive supermarket in walking distance, but I'd almost never go there because I used the car to go to work and stopped at a cheaper one on the way back. In Austria in the cities it's almost impossible to go by car to work because parking is incredibly expensive so most people use public transport or bikes

That depends on whether you live in a big city or not

Funny comment. You should tell this the Austrian chancellor.

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...

What per 1000? Cars?

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.

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...

Which provider offers such a cheap VPS?

You can find some on lowendbox.com Some go for ~$10/yr tho I wouldnt put anything important there.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

How does that explain a price difference? It's the exact same dutch products that are sold in Germany.

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

In Romania there's a similar site and app

https://monitorulpreturilor.info/

https://www.consiliulconcurentei.ro/en/

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Eurostat has a food price monitoring tool:

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

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

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.