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Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

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Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#191

Post by jonatron »

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.

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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#193

Post by iraqmtpizza »

midasuni wrote: post #130
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, there are genuinely dumb people out there who think that housing is a market failure. like homebuilders are unwilling to take necessary risks or something. and they definitely don't mean the risk of going to prison (100%)

Certainly in the U.K. house builders sit on masses of land but don’t develop it for fear of lowering sold prices. If building a house costs £100k Better to sell 5 at 400k each year for 10 years than sell 50 at 250k https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/31/britain-land-...

That's not a failure to take necessary risk or a problem of a too-short time horizon. Quite the opposite. And it is certainly not a tragedy of the commons situation.

At least not until you factor in government. What landowners and land speculators clearly don't fear is huge swaths of land suddenly becoming available for building. Or sharply increasing interest rates. Or mass deportations.

A market failure is more like how a CEO is often incentivized to maximize the stock price in the short run at the expense of the long-term health of the company. That is how his compensation is structured.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#194

Post by jonasdegendt »

quibus wrote: post #153

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...

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#195

Post by jsdwarf »

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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#196

Post by lotsofpulp »

wongarsu wrote: post #176
lotsofpulp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It 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.

Assuming 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…

>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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#197

Post by KeplerBoy »

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.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#198

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

jsdwarf wrote: post #195

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).

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#199

Post by iraqmtpizza »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #134
iraqmtpizza wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In precisely the part that you just left out

The only part I could have left out is the plain statement “Poland has still been hit by inflation, though.” That doesn’t even suggest calling for price controls. Yours was a kneejerk reaction.

In context it is very suggestive. Maybe you are incapable of inferences but other people are not, so I decided it was best to dispel that idea ahead of time.

Re: Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

#200

Post by fullstackchris »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #197

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

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