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To check price of items in Austria, the website is here: https://heisse-preise.io/ Browsing around, the prices look very reasonable and inexpensive to me. For example, 500 g bag of peanuts is 4.59 euros, the price has fluctuated between 3.39 to 5.59 euros over the years. Peanuts name is “Kelly's Erdnüsse geröstet & gesalzen”
I remember that show.
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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).
> 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.
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.
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There is, but not nearly as restrictive. Stores can be open from at least 6 to 20 any day of the week other than Sunday and in most states in Germany, Sunday trading has been at least partially permitted. In Austria you cannot even operate a fully automated grocery store (either by vending machines or something like Amazon Go) without being afoul of the regulation.
> There is, but not nearly as restrictive. Stores can be open from at least 6 to 20 any day of the week other than Sunday I just looked up the corresponding law for Austria, and they are allowed to open from 6 to 21 on weekdays, and 6 to 18 on Saturdays. Doesn't really seem more restrictive? > and in most states in Germany, Sunday trading has been at least partially permitted. Not really. For each Bundesland there ar…
You misread the law. Only for a total of 72 hours. So if you were to open from 6 to 21 you couldn’t open Saturday at all and would have to close early ok Friday.
In practical terms most supermarkets in Austria close at around 7pm.
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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).
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, politi…
What happened to TikTok in the US?
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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?
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Excuse me, but what expensive regulation and high grocery store workers' taxation are you talking about that's responsible for making prices so much higher than in Germany?
In 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 o…
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…
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…
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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, politi…
> 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?
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.