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Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

jacobfilipp.com

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Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#91

Post by oehpr »

dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #87
dennis_jeeves2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People generally get the govts they deserve. Canadians are no different. i.e blame Canadians not their overlords.

[flagged]

Blaming an entire countries population specifically, that elects representatives on a first past the post system, strikes me as a bit divorced from reality. Canadians do not live in a direct democracy, they don't explicitly vote on every policy, and they get to have less than a single bit of informational influence on their government every 4 years. There's blame to go around, for sure. But pegging it entirely on the citizenry is just not realistic.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#92

Post by huitzitziltzin »

‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if:

You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’

The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigation. Their data will be better than the data here.

You can rarely if ever prove these cases on the basis of data analysis alone. (Indeed if you could the world’s antitrust agencies would just monitor such data! And anyone engaging in collusion would attack the monitoring adversarially - not that hard to predict!)

In grocery data you will be looking at thousands and thousands of prices of different goods from different suppliers with different costs who are exposed to different shocks due to variation in the costs of their inputs or god knows what else.

Not to be negative bc the idea is nice, but this is a complete waste of time.

~ an actual antitrust guy.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#93

Post by kaibee »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #86
Reason077 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supermarkets often publish upcoming sale prices in advance, and matching your competitor’s prices is not collusion. On the contrary, it’s a sign of healthy competition! If supermarkets are getting together and forming handshake agreements like “we will not change prices between November and February”, like Canadian supermarkets apparently did, then that could constitute collusion.

Lowering prices together makes sense. But why would you raise your prices of a commodity product to match your competitor's? If they are going to raise, you hold and rake in the extra sales.

Do people really go comparison shop between stores? Like, I recognize that I'm coming from a more privileged economic position to not do so, but I still go to the cheap grocery store because it's the closest to me.

I'd imagine that even for low-income people, it's the cost/benefit of comparison shopping has been squeezed out by how much prices change on a day-to-day basis. Like sure, if you're buying a lot of something all at once it might make sense to do on that occasion, but once you do that a few times you either learn:

1. Which store usually has the lowest price (and if they have coupons for store X, they might just only go there, because... they can't use the coupon at the competitor's)

2. The difference in price doesn't offset the time-cost of going to multiple stores (and the consolidation of stores means that going to two different stores will take even more travel time).

So, if most people aren't really doing comparison shopping anyway, then you make more money by matching your prices to your competition.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#94

Post by jfil »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #69
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #4

Not sure if the author is here, but the downloadable SQLite database significantly benefits from applying compression (~75% with gzip). Also, is there a write-up of how they collected the prices? I have wanted to do a similar analysis for years, but immediately gave up realizing I would be spending 95% of my efforts scraping and entity matching. By and large manufacturers seem to go out of their way offer unique SKUs…

I was going to mention that your browser almost certainly sends an Accept-Encoding: gzip header, but it appears the server doesn't care to sent a Content-Encoding: gzip back!

I am the author - I appreciate your comment & the parent comment. I'll make the sqlite file more manageable shortly (wasn't expecting the project to get this much attention so its taking a while to catch up with everything!)

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#95

Post by adamomada »

There was a website a few years back that posted the prices of Brewers Retail (aka The Beer Store, single buyer of beer in Ontario) in a nicer, spreadsheet like format where you could sort by total price, price per mL, price per case size, etc etc (can’t recall the name of it at the moment). It was great. And transparent, and just data.

And were shut down by a threat of a lawsuit. Apparently you can’t do that in Canada. They had some stupid fine print that said the data was theirs and you can’t use it.

And I seem to recall similar fine print in grocery flyers.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#96

Post by Scoundreller »

winddude wrote: post #74
1970-01-01 wrote: post #51

I read this title as "reduce collision in a Canadian grocery store" and thought this was an app for parking.

or shopping carts in the store, need to cut down on the number of sorries.

No idea why people do not follow standard traffic conventions for right of way with a shopping cart (or while walking in general)

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#97

Post by Scoundreller »

chaostheory wrote: post #79

Isn’t the root of the problem Canadian protectionism? By law, it’s near impossible to have new (foreign) competitors in the Canadian market. Same for industries like telecom.

No laws against foreign grocers. Has been like shooting fish in a barrel for Wal-Mart and Costco.

But we do protect certain specific industries to our own detriment (e.g. we’ve knee-capped dairy to the point that we hardly export any, while in the free(r)-market, we export 80% of our pulse crops, 90% of our canola crop, 3rd largest wheat exporter in the world).

https://www.ecodainc.ca/pulses/

https://www.ccga.ca/advocacy/trade

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wheat/reporte...

As with oil, we like to export raw resources and let someone else do all the value-add elsewhere. But hey, dairy is very water intensive and it’s not like we enough of that to go around.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#98

Post by sys32768 »

I live 70 miles from the Canada border where we whine about Canadians crowding our Costco.

I roughly counted their plates in one section of the parking lot and about every fifth plate was from Alberta.

Edit: I have also witnessed Canadians in awe at how inexpensive was the stack of chewing tobacco they purchased.

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#99

Post by squigz »

FredPret wrote: post #90
a13n wrote: post #84

Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…

From your description it sounds as if we're stuck in a local optimum. It's tough to break out of that, but there's a lot of technological change coming our way and that tends to disrupt the status quo.

> there's a lot of technological change coming our way

Could you give some examples of some technologies that might disrupt the status quo being referred to?

Re: Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

#100

Post by jfil »

a13n wrote: post #84

Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly. In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the bi…

There's a fascinating cultural history of accepting cartels/oligopoly in Canada. I've heard it described as an "Us Against the Vast North" attitude that prevailed as the British settled Canada.

Also, I believe Canada's merger laws are very different from the USA's. We (in Canada) didn't check whether a merger is better for customers, the standard was to check whether it was good for shareholders. I believe this is changing with a modification to merger laws in the last year or two. It's slow, but change is coming.

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