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…
same is true for Canada vs USA. always more expensive products, and less selection in Canada.
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 ne…
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).
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…
> 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.
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…
Nothing of this changed in the last two years, though. So this hardly serves an explanation for the current price hikes.
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.
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 ne…
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).
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.
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”
£2.70 GBP per kg in Tesco (mid-range national supermarket). That would be €1.57 for 500g roasted salted peanuts.
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…
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.
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…
They absolutely do sell your data, they just launder it through various ad tech obfuscations to achieve a veneer of anonymization.
Commodities are routinely compared worldwide, and peanuts could be considered commodities. They are certainly closer to commodities than to services etc., even when packaged for the individual customer in fancy wrapping. I would understand your argument if you were talking about services.
The US produces the 5th most peanuts of all the countries in the world (interestingly, Sudan makes more). It may be a commodity but it’s a local one that doesn’t have to be internationally shipped or be taxed via tariffs. Also, in the US we don’t have VAT and apply sales tax post-hoc, so comparing store prices is really skewed by that.
"doesn’t have to be internationally shipped or be taxed via tariffs"
I agree with the taxation (duties), but actual shipping overseas is dirt cheap. It is more expensive to move your cargo overland by a truck than to move it to the other side of the world using a cargo ship.
The cost difference between moving a container of peanuts from Alabama to San Francisco and moving it from Alabama to Sydney is surprisingly small.