Schwerin" ... keine leichte Kost... stasi-unterlagen-archiv.de/ass…
Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
like this
felix b. ohmann and Steffen Voigt like this.
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the responsible minister claimed it's an immense task and will take til autumn. It will only include 16 product categories (think flour, milk,etc.). And it will only be updated once a week.
Given how Austria works, some corp close to the minister would have gotten the contract for a million on two to create a POS just enough so the minister can say "look, I did something!"
Well. I heard that and build a prototype for all products of the two biggest chains in 2 hours. The media picked it up...
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Here's a selection of media coverage of the entire thing.
It spread like wild fire and made the minister look like an idiot.
I took the thing down in fear of retaliation by the grocery chains. My plan: get a big NGO, news outlet or political party to host the thing and be a legal shield for the endevour.
Almost every NGO, media outlet and political party got in contzct with me (not the other way around). There were lots of promises and big words but zero action.
Heisse Preise
Nicht-kommerzielles Open-Source-Projekt um KonsumentInnen es zu ermöglichen, die günstigste Variante eines Produktes im Handel ausfindig zu machen.heisse-preise.io
All these orgs only had their self-interest in mind. After two weeks of this bullshit, I figured I might as well gamble and put this thing up in my own name.
Surely the grocery chains won't sue me. The bad PR would easily outweigh whatever little inckme loss they'd suffer from a few hundred people using the site to find the cheapest product.
You see, I'm basically just crawling the stores online stores. Most of them have an API. I then normalize the data across the stores, and expose it.
The whole thing runs client-site. The server fetches the latest data from the stores once a day. All data fits into 5mb of gzipped JSON. Small enough for the client to do anything. The server just serves 8 static files. It can handle serve all of Austria easily and could be scaled trivially. It's just static files.
Being the idiot I am, I also made it open-source:
github.com/badlogic/heisseprei…
And as usual, people flocked to it and contributed. In no time we had all stores in Austria in there.
GitHub - badlogic/heissepreise: Jo eh.
Jo eh. Contribute to badlogic/heissepreise development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial reshared this.
Then we also got German and Slovenian stores. Then we normalized product categories across stores and added some light data science techniques to match the same or similar products across stores to make prices more easily comparable. You know, iterative improvements.
And then some anomymous guy in Twitter send me the data he crawled for the two biggest chains. Starting in 2017. And that's when thinga really got interesting...
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
I scrambled to integrate his data into my platform. I added analytics tools. And then I ran my first few analyses. And my jaw dropped.
"Well, that's a bit to much of a price increase even given higher energy prices."
So I started to dig. And boy did I find a lot of things...
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My first analysis actually happened before I build the platform. I was manually comparing prices of products the stores themselves offer in the lowest price segment. Things like grocer store brand milk or flour.
I compared 40 product pairs across the two biggest chains. And lo and behold: their prices matched exactly to the cent!
An NGO picked this up on Twitter and did the analysis for 600 product pairs. Same picture.
With my platform in place, I could do more advanced stuff.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
E.g. given the historical data, I could see price movements for a product across the two chains. And you won't believe what I found (well, you know what's coming...)
Them fine grocery chains changed the prices of the self-branded low cost products with one to two days, or even on the same day. And they both came up with the exact same price.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
This wasn't only happening in the low-price chain-brand segment. It also happened in the mid-range segment of self-branded goods.
And it all started happening when inflation went through the roof.
Clearly, something was up. My guess was: tacit collusion, meaning, oligopolic price coordination without explicit coordination.
Meanwhile, others have build platforms like I did as well. And they too saw these patterns.
There were more.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
We could show shrinkflation, meaning products with less content are sold for the same or even higher price.
Examplified by e.g. laundry detergent.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Even more interestingly, products exclusively produced in Austria cost less outside of Austria.
Billa is the Austrian version of REWEDE.
Even fucking Red Bull, an Austrian brand, costs more in Austria when it is discounted here, than it costs normally without discount in Germany.
WTF.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Then I looked at an aspect pretty unique to Austria: discounts.
You see, in a normal country, with a competitive grocery market, you usually have about 10%-20% of products that get discounted on average.
In Austria, that rate is 40%. It's a fantastic way to obfuscate the actual price of a product. As a customer, you'll never know what you'll pay on that day until you see the current discounts directly in the store.
The chains are very generous and will send you discount leaflets via mail.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
If I were trying to describe it in more flowerly terms: It's asymmetric information war fare.
The stores tell you they are good and benevolent and only have your interest at heart, so here are discounts. Discounts for everyone. They even gamified the whole thing with stickers. I shit you not. People collect stickers they put on the products in the convery belt at the register. There's also apps, which will give them all info on you
In reality it makes it impossible to know how much things cost
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totetmatt and Cory Doctorow reshared this.
The grocery chains got a little iffy about all that somewhat negative media coverage, some of which was spurred by my continued analyses.
They started to put out these things in the store. It basically says "We've already lowered the prices of 450 products for you this year". With a sortiment of 22000.
They were also dumb enough to put out a machine readable PDF with all the products they lowered the price for.
With a little data science magic, I was able to match those with my database...
The spot check showed that their claims were true on the surface.
But I'm a stickler for data, so I looked a bit closer.
And lo and behold. There was fun to be had.
There are products that are cyclic in their price changes. E.g. this axe shower gel, which they listed as having a lower price now.
Yeah, you lowered the price from 3.99 to 2.99. But that follows the exact pattern this product's price had over the last couple of years.
Technically correct. But not a permanent price decrease.
Second picture is another example of that.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
But there's a more "nefarious" kind of price decrease.
As I said, Austria is a country of insane amounts of cyclic discounts. Many products will be sold for their "regular" price for one week and a discount price the other.
The real price for the consumer is the average of the regular and discounted price.
Given this knowledge, do you notice something with the prices for this product the grocery chain claims to have decreased the regular price on?
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Of course you do, cause you are a smart cookie.
While their claim that they decreased the regular price is correct, they also increased the discounted price that comes into play every other X weeks/days.
So they are again technically correct: the regular price was decreased.
But on average, a consumer pays more if they buy the product every week, as the discounted price has been increased. The average is higher than before.
Sneaky.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
All that media coverage of my platform and the platforms of other people, with whom I've started to converse and who've became friends of sorts, triggered the competition authority of Austria.
You know, the guys and gals who's job it is to sniff out anti-competitive behaviour, cartels, price gauging and coordination and so on.
They contacted all of us to ask what we'd need to continue doing our work. They actually saw value in that.
We provided them with a shit ton of feedback.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
The basic gist of that feedback:
- Legal: it must be legal for us to crawl and publish the price data the stores put out on the web in their online stores
- Technical: ideally, stores would be forced to put that data out in a normalized form, so matching and comparisons become easier. We already did that ourselves though, with some data science and heuristics, so no biggie if that doesn't happen.
Besides that feedback, I also send them a shitton of data and patterns I found.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
I'm but a lowly computer nerd and lay person, and not someone with an economics degree. I simply handed the data over in the hopes their experts would figure this shit out.
Well. Today they presented their first preliminary report.
In it, they basically copied my long ass email with answers to their questions from earlier more or less verbatim. They agreed with my conclusions regarding what needs to be done on the legal and technical site.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
And they also officially said it's very likely the grocery chains use automated systems to follow each other in prices.
No word on the other data. We'll find out what they think end of October when the full report is scheduled to be released.
Now, here's how the chain of command works in this sector.
The competition authority is apolitical but under the reign of the politically appointed minister of economics. They can only report and suggest to him.
He then decides what gets done.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
The suggestion by the competition authority to the minister was great:
1. Using the data should be made legal by the legislature for certain parties, including price comparison platforms and academic institutions.
2. Grocery chains of a certain size must publish all their data in real-time according to a predefined scheme with all necessary meta data to make things comparable and allow matching of products across stores.
Fantastic! Or so I thought.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Remember the chain of command. The minister decides what actually gets done.
And that minister is a member of the conservative party. You can already guess what gets done, right?
His plan:
1. The grocery chains must publish data. But only for a hand-picked list of basic products. Not the entire sortiment, like we do now.
2. Platform owners can be sanctioned/sued if they display the data the wrong way.
There's are only two up-sides in all of this.
First of all, the minister initially planned to create a price comparison platform "himself". This would have meant that some company he's buddy buddy with would have gotten a million Euro contract and delivered an abmysal failure of a system.
He's now given up on that.
The second upside: as soon as media coverage of our efforts picked up, the price hikes stopped for the most part. I'm obviously not entirely attributing this to our work. But I like to think we played a part in it.
I don't have a sound cloud, but I have another little project.
We have a charity where we ask for donations which we convert into €50 grocery vouchers for Ukrainian families that fled to Austria. Our state fails them as well.
We are zero overhead, every cent goes towards the vouchers. We pay the rest (envelops, stamps, printer cartridges, etc.)
We are 100% transparent, all contracts/orders/bills/payments here:
drive.google.com/drive/folders…
Bunch of friends doing stuff.
Cards for Ukraine
Tanja Maier sends €50 grocery vouchers to Ukrainian refugees in Austria.cards-for-ukraine.at
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Richard Kogelnig reshared this.
Yeah, the irony of sending grocery vouchers for the same grocery stores that I go up against with my platform is not lost on me.
Anyways, we've been able to send out ~4500 vouchers in a bit over a year to as many families. That's about €220,000 worth of donations.
~6000 families have signed up with us, about 1500 are still waiting for a voucher.
If you can spare some money, here you go:
cards-for-ukraine.at/donate
The latest batch went out today. CW link to shitbird site
twitter.com/badlogicgames/stat…
Cards for Ukraine
Tanja Maier sends €50 grocery vouchers to Ukrainian refugees in Austria.cards-for-ukraine.at
Oh, and if you want to do this for your own country, you can re-use what we build so far!
github.com/badlogic/heisseprei…
Happy to help if you need guidance! Adding a store is usually less than 200 LOC if they have a search API in their web store.
github.com/badlogic/heisseprei…
GitHub - badlogic/heissepreise: Jo eh.
Jo eh. Contribute to badlogic/heissepreise development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
We have an app called Instashop, it's a grocery ordering app, but they don't have their own stock, instead they let you search for nearby stores and see their catalog and passes the order to them.
Not just that, they've also normalized products across stores so you can search by product and see where it's available and its price.
The app also works for local pharmacies (most things are over-the-counter here) and bakeries and more.
instashop.com
Wow .. what a read. Do you know about Project Galileo to help you out protecting the site/servers/... ?
Project Galileo
Through Project Galileo, Cloudflare provides free cyber security services to organizations supporting the arts, human rights, journalism, and democracy.Cloudflare
you have absolutely no reason to apologize. You did the work. You potentially changed the lives of thousands or even millions of people for the better.
You did good and you deserve nothing but praise, regardless of code quality.
BRB, forking it to rewrite in typescript. ;)
Your whole story is amazing. Everyone should read this!
If I can do just a fraction of what you have done for your fellow humans, I'll feel that I've lived a useful life. That's the aim. :)
@DavBot I'm all for that. That's why this is OSS and easy to self-host. Adding a new store is usually less than 200 LOC (code quality is terrible tho :D)
github.com/badlogic/heisseprei…
GitHub - badlogic/heissepreise: Jo eh.
Jo eh. Contribute to badlogic/heissepreise development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
This is amazing. Thank you for doing this!
I believe a lot of supermarkets here (in BE) have API's... hmmmz.
Thanks for your incredible job.
I wish more people where educated to act like you! You are doing such an important job!
Keep it up, you have all my support!
mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlog…
This is a long and interesting thread worth reading.
Great work that @badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place did. And not enough by itself he's using it to advertise a good cause he's working for, helping people who had to flee from there homes.
What a shame for our democracies that a guy like this needs to waste a single **thought about being sued **for analyzing public available data.
And that was my story. Thank you for coming to my TED talk. And don't spend your holiday money in Austria, we suck.
Thank you for sharing this great story!
I would love to host one talk about it at @fosdem conference in the room I co-organize about Open Research @FosdemResearch in Brussels Feb the 3rd 2024 or online Feb the 10th 2024.
We organize this session to discuss how research (of any kind: acamedic, activism...) is shaped by #FLOSS or #opendata development or use.
Please consider joining us and feel free to contact me if needed.
All details here: research-fosdem.github.io/
Open Research Devroom
A place to discuss the creation and use of Free Libre Open Source Software in research context: science, investigative journalism, activism, OSINT…Open Research Devroom
also in the US there is a rather nefarious pricing scheme that happens at some big stores - where prices for the same products vary from physical store to physical store of the same chain. (And prices for many products will differ when priced for delivery whether same day or by mail from the in store prices. Which makes looking at their websites or apps for prices even less reliable.
(And some companies do things like send you a discount if you merely open their website once)
the dual-role mayor/Landeshauptmann thing which the other parties hate but only because they want it to be *their* personal fiefdom instead.
did you see the report by the IMF (yes, the Internationale Währungsfond) that half the inflation was caused by company profits? draketo.de/politik/kommentare#…
imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023…
It’s crazy that that story didn’t already get people riled up, but it seems they have to see *how* it happens and get a news anchor (2 hours vs. 2 months) to find it, and you showed that beautifully!
Europe’s Inflation Outlook Depends on How Corporate Profits Absorb Wage Gains
Higher prices so far mostly reflect increases in profits and import costs, but labor costs are picking upIMF
@interfluidity That's just a bizarre use of government regulation when we have more information than we've ever had and you could easily create a website to track this stuff.
also a grocery chain that had superior price transparency could already have a competitive advantage so I still don't see a market failure.
@cshentrup That's... not neoliberal. Perfect information is an assumption of the models. There are not well supported models under which superior transparency is a reliable competitive advantage.
The author of the original thread literally did create a platform to track this stuff. What he wants to "force" is publication of that information online so that chains can't obfuscate/opt their way out of it.
@cshentrup convenient information from a store is not price transparency. price transparency means that consumers know all the prices across the market so they can choose among competing suppliers.
i'm glad your store offers you convenient options and tells you the prices they will charge for them! but having the price at the point of sale is very far from price transparency. (it's astonishing we have markets — e.g. health care — where we don't even have that!)
@interfluidity so being able to conveniently compare prices across countless stores from my computer is not transparency?
and creating a website where I show the average price for a basket of identical goods at 5 to 10 local grocers also doesn't count?
hmmm.
@cshentrup All that the author is asking to "force" is maintaining the technical capacity to create the latter at large grocery chains.
Not much of a coercion by the leviathan, perfectly justifiable on orthodox neoliberal grounds. Prices should be posted. Here's the public space, the inexpensive modality, by which you are to post them.
Not much of a bite by the overweening leviathan.
@cshentrup that is very expensive. and prices can change frequency.
creating those kinds of market frictions is how firms undermine the perfect competition neoliberal models rely upon, discrediting them as a practical matter.
i no longer call myself a neoliberal (i might once have), but if you want to support the cause, this is exactly the sort of intervention you should support, the kind that makes some approximation of perfect competition real.
@interfluidity I don't see how changing them week by week is going to appreciably change their RELATIVE cost. I live within cycling distance of two different whole foods, a new seasons market, a market of choice, a Fred Meyer...
Fred is always going to be the cheapest of those any week of the year. followed by market of choice followed by new seasons followed by whole foods.
@cshentrup Walmart famously cultivated a (deserved) reputation for everyday low prices, made its profits by strategically raising prices on subsets of goods, relying on the everyday low profits reputation to draw customers in who would presume these goods would be around best-price when they were not.
Fred Meyer has an opportunity with u to do the same!
Under competitive markets, relative prices certainly wld vary btw stores offering similar quality+services. (WF is a different amenities tier)
@cshentrup well, we'll disagree but let's be nice about it.
i am not a neoliberal, who thinks markets should be left alone but for narrowly circumscribed failures.
i am more Polanyian these days, i think markets are polymorphic beasts that states must shape and manage to yield prosocial outcomes, and encouraging price transparency (as much with carrots as sticks) in one useful way they can do that.
@cshentrup even more deeply than about markets, we disagree about social welfare functions and there inherent dependence on inherently neither objective nor scientific values, and about the use and authority of what purports to be objective science in social affairs.
we've debated that _ad nauseum_ before (a bit here, more on the QSite). i have little interest in picking it up again.
@interfluidity You can't disagree about objective facts.
and you can't merely criticize my utility function, you have to propose an alternative and show how it better fits the data. You couldn't do that to save your life.
@cshentrup people debated policy long before Bentham coined the notion of "utility". the distinction between utility and welfare i described—utility is positive, a construct deployed to predict and describe—while welfare normative—about prescribing, which inherently depends upon values—is what you would learn in any welfare economics class. my salad is very popular, and its dressing is very orthodox.
(tbf, Bentham used utility normatively, and most of us slip up on the distinction often.)
@interfluidity policy isn't about prescribing anything. it's about determining the optimal policy, regardless of whether you prescribe it.
we could discover a new optimal treatment for cancer and not necessarily prescribe it to people. You're confusing two different activities.
@interfluidity this is explained for by decreasing marginal utility you dolt.
with a concave utility function, a loss of x reduces your utility more than a foregone gain of x. Christ this is basic.
@cshentrup i'm not sure what productive role "you dolt" has in this conversation. i'm a trained economist, fwiw.
the concavity of a utility function is used to express risk preferences. under a concave utility function, keeping $1 is worth more than a 1% chance of earning $100. an agent with concave utility would always turn down a fair lottery, let alone one that pays on $99 for the 1% chance to earn a $100. 1/
@interfluidity I've worked with experts in the field for like 20 years. I co-founded a non-profit based on this policy. I visited Kenneth Arrow at his home and we interviewed him. I'm in a book about this topic. You have made countless classic amateur mistakes just in this thread. You have no idea what you're talking about.
some light reading for you
@cshentrup you've pointed me to that piece about a million times. we're going to, as we have before, disagree about who has very little idea about what they're talking about.
i admire your nonprofit's support of approval voting, which i think is probably the best-available practical procedure we have for single-winner elections!
@interfluidity of course it is useful for predicting individual choices, as long as you account for externalities like information. this is the same reason the allais paradox in no way counters utilitarianism. You can trivially frame the question in a way that people won't make the inconsistent choice. it's about information externalities.
@interfluidity this is utter nonsense. the concept of ordinal utility has been obliterated. it is a complete crank fringe concept, trivially refuted by a revealed preference lottery.
@cshentrup why do you think it helps a conversation to insult people?
i wish you were right, that economics as a discipline were more open to cardinal utilities. i think it was broadly an error to insist upon ordinality (an error made bc the profession wished to be scientistic in the way that you also wish to be, to be able to offer authoritative statements independent of values). but take a course in microeconomics and you will learn the contemporary consensus remains utility must be ordinal.
I have refuted you through and through. No one in the field of economics seriously proposes ordinal utilities. You are living in a fantasyland. come to Jesus man.
@cshentrup no one "believes in" ordinal utility, because utility is not a thing in the world, but a way of organizing models that are intended to explain and predict behavior.
no one publishes models based on cardinal utility.
@interfluidity the tautology fallacy. You are like a windup toy of utilitarian fallacies.
@interfluidity or if they do, they will readily concede the point if you just show them the results of a revealed preference lottery. I've literally done this.
I'm taking a microeconomics course right now from the University of Illinois, just for fun, and not seeing anybody propose ordinal utilities.
"the preference relation associated with a utility function is an ordinal property"
here's another screenshot, same PDF (this PDF appears to be a draft of an edition, since we see Exercise ??), "the special forms of the utility representations in (i) and (ii) are not preserved; they are —it cardinal properties that are simply convenient choices for a utility representation."
@interfluidity You are a predictable caricature of utilitarian misunderstandings. utilities don't need to be interpersonally comparable.
@cshentrup your piece describes a normative point — one that i agree with ( and have written about interfluidity.com/v2/5486.html )
as a matter of policy, it does not matter, to me, that perhaps you are a "utility monster" and giving you a chocolate perhaps from some neurological or whatever perspective gives more pleasure than my basic bread gives me. 1/
in something like the harsanyi thought experiment, i'll simply argue that as a normative matter, when we model policy, we should treat one another as having the same preference (over broad aggregates like money or access to health care, not over chocolate vs vanilla).
but that is an axiom. there's is no empirical data or fact about the world that justifies the choice. it is not "empirical". it simply reflects my (and i suspect your) egalitarian values. /fin
You're taking that term too literally. You might know that you are a billionaire and therefore support low tax rates. but there are things you don't know about your future self. All that is practically irrelevant is uncertainty about the future. again you're not following.
@interfluidity Well you're not an idiot compared to the average human walking around. maybe you are in the 99th percentile but you aren't in the 99.9th.
and of course it was informative because I demonstrably taught you a bunch of things you didn't know, most notably how interpersonal utility comparisons aren't necessary to justify utilitarianism in any sense.
@interfluidity avoid a rawlsian " veil of ignorance" interpretation. we aren't talking here about being ignorant of your identity. we're purely focusing on the part about being self-interested.
for instance imagine Alice Bob and Eve are being asked which of several economic regimes they want. to simplify let's just imagine they are voting on how to allocate a sum of cash. Alice is in poverty, Bob is middle class and Eve is a billionaire hedge fund manager or whatever...
@interfluidity a great example. a revenue neutral land value tax distributed as a UBI would make 70% of citizens better off. thus a huge majority has an incentive to promote such policy, if they are properly informed.
this requires no ignorance about your identity.
There you may behold the rent: Effects of a UK land dividend
Funding universal basic income with a land value tax would reduce poverty and inequality, while raising questions about distributional measurement.UBI Center
@interfluidity I think you might be using an intermediate era definition of neoliberal because that doesn't match what the original or the modern day neoliberals believe at all.
twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/…
but regardless, you still can't accurately attribute the component of wealth derived from skilled allocation and value creation versus anti-competitive practices so I think it's mostly a moot point in practice.
@interfluidity "i'm never gonna convince a guy who insists i make a mathematically valid argument."
fucking obnoxious nonsense.
@cshentrup There are more things in heaven and earth, my dear Horatio, than can be drawn as Harberger triangles.
Money and investment are different things. Access to funds flows can sometimes rival rather than support investment. Perfectly rationally, from a shareholders perspective, but not from a social perspective. Those interests are different, and often misaligned.
@cshentrup but until we succeed at the first best much more fully than we have thus far, we will need to supplement it with the second best.
as long as the costs of the second-best, the backstop, are reasonable! which is why the question of what behavior in fact different taxes would discourage and encourage is the heart of the question. 6/
@cshentrup if i am right that FDR-style taxation discourages very little that is productive and compensation choices that yield a better income distribution, we should do it!
if i am wrong, and in fact FDR-style taxations would lead to an atlas-shrugged style withdrawal by the best and brightest of our community and an economic catastrophe for all, then we should look for different approaches. 7/
@cshentrup this is true of UBI too, where i think we mostly agree. people argue over incentives to work, etc. most of the evidence that i know of is pretty positive on these grounds, and the non-increase of an effective tax rate is an argument that's labor supportive. but the other side claims the mere reduction of desperation will harm work incentives.
you can't know for sure until you have some history with it. that's just the nature of social affairs! /fin
@interfluidity Well that's a whole other issue on top of the direct welfare impacts. which is why I co-founded one of the two major electoral reform organizations in the US.
@cshentrup yes! i'm very with you on your electoral work.
(i thought you were affiliated with electionscience.org/ ?)
The Center for Election Science | Fairer, More Representative Elections
We are a nonpartisan nonprofit advocating for better voting methods that will create more representative elections. We empower people—not politicians.The Center for Election Science
@interfluidity it's not at all necessarily true that the best option is to prevent the fires. That may not be cost effective.
it's also not particularly relevant to the question of what percentage of profit is the result of causing negative externalities.
Why and how should it be illegal to crawl that data?
Before I read this toot, I wouldn't have worried about this in the slightest.
In Poland we recently got a regulation saying that when advertising a discount, the shop has to provide the lowest price from last 30 days as comparison.
So if 2 weeks ago it was 2.99, yesterday it was 3.99, and today they're lowering the price again to 2.99, they d have to say they lowered from 2.99 to 2.99
In Australia, Coles does this.
It's yet another advantage rich people have over the poor: I pay less for my groceries because I can buy them when they're discounted before I need them, and ignore them when they are not discounted.
Insight and frustrating data for me - as here in Lithuania, Red Bull is normally €1.49 (and of course discounts drop it a bit), so pricing probably resembles the Austria, rather than Germany, graph. I have a strong suspicion there is also supermarket collusion here (there are only three bigger supermarkets + Lidl), but I’ve not actually done much data analysis to confirm my theory.
Lidl definitely does the non-standard product sizes - I compared Lithuanian water bottles from there vs. normal shops where they were a tiny bit more expensive, and realised that the bottle I thought was 2L (from the normal store) was 1.8L at Lidl and the same or more expensive by volume!
Regarding comparisons across countries you need to be a bit careful because the listed prices include VAT and that is different in different countries. AFAIK Germany has a significantly different VAT for beverages, for example.
In any case, thanks for your great work. I hope that exposing this cartel will have some serious consequences.
You are right, certainly not by that amount. It seem that Germany has 19% VAT for beverages compared to 20% in Austria, so not significant.
They have only 7% for some articles like food and we have 10%. Apparently we also have 13% for some articles it seems.
So yeah, you were right about roughly 1-3% difference.
I wonder whether the German "Dosenpfand" plays a role in the Redbull comparison, but I have no idea how that works.
What is for certain is that the Oligopoli is a problem.
I just saw news about Carrefour warning its customers about products showing shrinkflation: boingboing.net/2023/09/15/fren…
That's a pretty unusual move from a supermarket chain
French supermarket chain Carrefour puts "shrinkflation" warnings on price-gouging brands | Boing Boing
Carrefour, one of the world’s largest grocery chains, is slapping warnings on products when the size shrinks but the price does not. The labels come amid reports of falling costs and rising p…Boing Boing
The amount of plastic used looks the same. Haven't manufacturers heard that plastic has contaminated every environment on Earth?
Of course, they have. But...
only a few lettes difference, no surprise.
But you have haver kangaroos and koalas.
Well, and everything else that tries to kill you on an hourly basis.
I'm sorry you have it worse.
my partner, a systems engineer, says this looks like naturally emergent behaviour from a poorly tuned feedback loop, aka @standupmaths story of the $23 million book. It doesn't require obvious collusion, just automated systems monitoring each other with an inbuilt bias to slightly increase prices.
It would be interesting to know the dates the supermarkets started monitoring each others prices.
Guessing they tweaked the global % increase when petrol prices went up, and at least one of the supermarkets turned theirs down when your stuff was reported.
Rookie question: in the countries where the data has been scraped to date, is the data on the grocers' websites behind a login, or is it just available?
Here you have to log in to even see the products and the prices.
@CuriousMatter they are most often the same. The online stores do not list local products. E.g. our local stores have locally produced donuts that aren't in the Austria wide online store.
Other than such things, it's pretty much the same on- and offline.
I can't speak for the much larger US market I'm afraid.
If I understand it correctly, rewe/müller are only for comparison currently
@MrGamy yes, REWE (Passau), Müller, and DM are only for comparison with Austrian equivalents.
I'm afraid I lack the time to tackle other countries. But I know for a fact that there are very capable developers all around the world that can take my public code and make it work for the stores in their countries. I'm happy to give guidance.
you are a hero!
just did the right thing at the right time
thanks for your contribution to society
In a functional market situation you would try to go bellow the prices of your competitors to attract their customers to grow you own market share.
Very happy that I read your thread. I hope someone will pick this up in NL, too. Because shrinkflation and grabflation are widespread here, too.
Anyone in The Netherlands who is willing and able to pickup the initiative Mario started of collecting product price data and showing their price fluctuations through time? Otherwise we keep getting f*d up our tiny a**s by procucers and retailers.
Amazing thread, thank you.
I'm sure the same is happening in the UK, oh to see the data.
Outstanding work, and with your charity too.
of course. But it gives one reason why rewe "had their eye on all the prices from hofer/spar etc." as @auris pointed out.
And of course it's true, they just could stay low if anyone else increases and it seems like obvious price gauging if they all do it almost simultaneously.
I just wanted to point out that there are partial links between prices that rewe and spar even use in their advertisement.
a little bit of older "funfacts" (if you enjoy throwing up): docu film "Auslaufmodell Supermarkt?" from arte in 2021. dw.com currently has it at dw.com/de/auslaufmodell-superm…
and srf should have it in their mediathek as well. mediethekview helps getting it.
whats not to love about those companies...
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good job, well done. I recall that there was a website in the UK that did supermarket price comparisons, but it was shut down via copyright law: the supermarkets licence product images from a third party so when the guy used the same images as the supermarkets to.illustrate the price comparisons, he was threatened by the product image company and forced to shut down.
this is interesting. I saw it's quite easy to add stores from other countries, but how difficult would it be to support a different currency?
thinking of adding Spar, Lidl, DM and Muller for Hungary, the problem is they have HUF instead of EUR.
This is what, in business jargon, we like to call "good fucking investigative journalism".
Good bloody job!
Excellent thread. The whole inflation thing has been much worse in Hungary, mostly I'd guess the same kind of price gouging (interestingly lidlaldi managed to return to sub 500 HUF prices for a litre of milk on their own - from a ~850 maximum I saw last year) and a whole lot of political and economical mismanagement factors that make up the real gist of the "war inflation" in Orbanistan.
They made a price watcher app, but it's mostly aimed at "the evil foreign multinational corpos"
Hey @pluralistic, you may love this thread
mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlog…
Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
fantastic work Mario. It set me thinking about how discounts penalise those who most need them when operated in the ways you describe.
Essentially, and I do this, those who can will stock up when a discount happens and rarely have to pay the full price.
But guess who cannot afford to do this, and so pay much closer to what you call the average price.
@happyborg Absolutely true. Here in Austria, the stores have self-branded lowest cost products for this "segment" (what a terrible term).
They don't discount these at all.
Guess which products have significantly increased in price?
Well, thanks for educating me, person from some far away country who does not have to visit Ausschwitz as part of their school education, so they can remember what fucked up shit their grand and grand grand parents did. I too shall start just looking shit up on Wikipedia and make wild comparisons on the interrnet between entirely unrelated things.
Cheerio.
Great story!
Practically the same thing happened in Croatia, only we did get a government-run price tracking site that had no real-world effects.
And we already did know that Croatian products are cheaper outside of Croatia thanks to all of the people that left the country in search of a better life :)
Higher prices, lower wages :)
That's what you get when you have a criminal organization (HDZ) running the country.
But at least you can buy Croatian products for cheap in Austria :)
I would be interested, but my programming skills ended with Pascal..
I noticed similar issues at one of our grocery stores (Stop & Shop), where they routinely do “New Low Price!” & I know the price the previous price was actually the same at one point.
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