Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites • Hacker News Board

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#361

Post by FirmwareBurner » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 9:06 AM UTC

oddmiral wrote: post #157

helpfulContrib wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

Pro-Russian wing in EU forbid import of cheap Ukrainian food into EU as a kind of sanctions against Ukraine, which caused the spike in food prices.

Nothing to do with being pro-Russia. EU farmers themselves were against duty-free imports of cheap Ukrainian foodstuffs because unfair competition to them which they can't compete against.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#362

Post by 6510 » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 9:11 AM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #180

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #169

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-h…

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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#363

Post by jorams » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 9:22 AM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #303

Aurornis wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#364

Post by helpfulContrib » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:02 AM UTC

masswerk wrote: post #286

mrcode007 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian ties in Austria have been strong for a couple of years and they’re simply coming to light (mentioning this in context of energy trade) Austrian spymaster warns of Russian ties as far right claws back support https://on.ft.com/45UTDUp As well in context of security apparatus cooperation Journalist Who Exposed Russia Spies Flees Vienna on Safety Fears https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-02/journalis…

This is tied to those days of the coalition of the conservative party with the FPÖ, which terminated on Mai 28, 2019 (which is significantly before 2022), with strong positions of the FPÖ in the entire security apparatus (including some infights with strongholds of the conservative party in these institutions, related court cases ongoing). Kneissl left already before this, in early June 2019. The FPÖ had actually sig…

>the Austrian military intelligence has some agreements of cooperation with the NSA

Same with Australia, whose people are also unable to gain oversight over their militarys' activities.

The more the "mah' Russia!" crowd bleat, the more it looks like we've actually manifested the very apparatus the Soviets' would have implemented, too, were they still around ..

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#365

Post by helpfulContrib » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:03 AM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #152

Haemm0r wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High gas prices are not a thing anymore: It is about EU average: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/bef444e2-... Interesting fact when looking at the data: Many countries with a "high" inflation right now have very low gas prices.

I cannot judge what "EU average" is. I can only tell you that the gas price that a household customer pays today is still twice than it was before this crisis and that is reflected in wholesale prices if you compare the cost of gas in Austria compared to 2020 and earlier.

Gas, petrol for cars, or gas, for heating and cooking?

It seems the Americans in this thread might be a bit confused about that.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#366

Post by manmal » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:13 AM UTC

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #204

manmal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matter 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).

Literally 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…

There 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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#367

Post by hnwizard » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:31 AM UTC

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

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#368

Post by iraqmtpizza » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

orangepurple wrote: post #230

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stock 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.

According 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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#369

Post by DelightOne » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 10:56 AM UTC

ro-_-b wrote: post #260

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…

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

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#370

Post by iraqmtpizza » Sun, Sep 17, 2023, 11:00 AM UTC

manmal wrote: post #366

iraqmtpizza wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally 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…

There 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 expens…

Shipping 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.