Tracking Austrian grocery prices by scraping store sites

I lived in Austria and in Germany and it&#x27;s 100% true, prices in supermarkets are significantly higher in Austria even for products produced in Austria.<p>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 Austria is less than in Germany. Furthermore, many supermarkets are located in areas hard to reach like mountain areas. Higher logistic costs translate to higher prices * VAT is slightly higher in Austria * unqualified labor that works in supermarkets and logistics makes slightly more money in Austria than in Germany * there indeed is a higher supermarket tensity in Austria than in Germany. Supermarkets of the same company appear more appealing in Austria than in Germany: nicer presentation of food, cleaner, way less people in the line waiting. All this makes them more expensive<p>For all these reasons mentioned above prices are higher. I argue it&#x27;s mostly related to consumer choices. If they would care so much about prices and so little about esthetics as in Germany then prices would come down. If people would start to walk the extra mile for the cheaper supermarket prices would come down.

As an Austrian dev and consumer who has closely followed this throughout the year: it&#x27;s soo frustrating to see how we&#x27;re ripped off for no good reason, but nothing changes and nobody cares.<p>Hats off to Mario for sticking with the topic and not losing his mind over this infuriating madness.

If it&#x27;s like the UK, there is so much &quot;shrinkflation&quot; (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 &quot;tricks&quot; already existed but they&#x27;re being used more and more.<p>All the supermarkets have full inventory databases, they could send you an updated price list of every product every five minutes at basically no cost. This smacks of a legislature don&#x27;t&#x2F;won&#x27;t seek advice from experts. It&#x27;s a start I suppose.

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)<p>My point is: we need a Europe-wide price comparison if the situation should change.

It’s crazy how many interesting things you can find when scraping prices of services and products online (most of the time tricks that aim to screw the customer). I think it’s time the EU legislates that companies provide pricing data via a standardised API so that we can all benefit, and so these tricks are deterred.<p>I’ve actually built a scraper for Disney World holidays[1] and found some interesting hacks to get cheaper deals, for example purchasing separate hotel tickets lasting a part of the full stay. I plan to make a holiday inflation index out of this eventually.<p>1 - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mousetrack.co.uk" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mousetrack.co.uk</a>

This was a really interesting read! I find it so tiresome trying to evaluate food prices and optimize grocery shopping to optimize [time and money spent], and a large data set like this could make it much easier. Is anyone aware of a similar price analysis for the United States?

I&#x27;m not sure how other mastodon servers look, but this one is light years ahead of Twitter in terms of readability. I hope someone eventually writes a tell-all book about exactly what was wrong with that company and its approach to product design.

This is a great thread, and it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens.

Fellow Austrian here. I have send the link to some journalists and friends. I wonder how to make this actionable both to force politics to act upon this and for the consumer as well.

I was pondering about an idea for an app that will crowdsource prices of items and their development in the time. You know, to be aware when there is some product discount, but during the discount period, the original price is higher that usual which means customer is being mislead.<p>This practice, although prevalent, is not legal in EU [1]<p>The app would let you track prices for products in individual stores by scanning their EANs. You could see price development and website could show stores that use unfair pricing.<p>Seems doable to me but I may be missing some technical challenges that would come with implementing this approach.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;europa.eu&#x2F;youreurope&#x2F;citizens&#x2F;consumers&#x2F;unfair-treatment&#x2F;unfair-pricing&#x2F;index_en.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;europa.eu&#x2F;youreurope&#x2F;citizens&#x2F;consumers&#x2F;unfair-treat...</a>

Prices should be <i>slightly</i> higher in Austria, because the VAT (Mehrwertsteuer) is 20% for most consumer goods, and 10% for food, vs. Germany’s 19% and 7%, but not as outlandishly so as Mario’s data have shown.<p>For American readers: VAT is included in the shelf price, rather than tacked on at the register like sales taxes are in the US. Upside: fewer surprises at the register. Downside: it’s less visible.

To check price of items in Austria, the website is here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heisse-preise.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heisse-preise.io&#x2F;</a><p>Browsing around, the prices look very reasonable and inexpensive to me.<p>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.<p>Peanuts name is “Kelly&#x27;s Erdnüsse geröstet &amp; gesalzen”

The key point for me was the quote about asymetric information warfare, where it was impossible to know what the price of anything was until you were at the checkout. This used to be common on durable goods, professional services, and and big ticket items, but data science in retail has got it down to the micro level.

I wish paying with the phone would not only transfer how much we paid where. I&#x27;d like to get more details like single item prices. This would enable us to track prices ourselves.

I don&#x27;t understand why people, at least in Vienna, go to alternative stores. There are so many small stores with much better food prices in Vienna. I guess prices need to rise even more until people change their behavior.

I wanted to do something similar for Greek supermarkets but I never had the time. Great to see something is available and I don’t have to rediscover the wheel.<p>The situation with inflation, prices, interest rates and the whole state of the European&#x2F;global economy is so f**ed up that only with tools like this one we can expose what is happening in the market

&gt;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.<p>Imagine how much good could be done in the world if developers could create things for the common good without fear of corporate legal retaliation.

Only part i don&#x27;t agree with is don&#x27;t visit Austria. I had such a nice time there this summer, cant wait to go back.<p>And everything is so cheap compared to Swedish grocery stores ..

Eurostat has a food price monitoring tool:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;eurostat&#x2F;cache&#x2F;website&#x2F;economy&#x2F;food-price-monitoring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ec.europa.eu&#x2F;eurostat&#x2F;cache&#x2F;website&#x2F;economy&#x2F;food-pri...</a>

Stop and Stop &#x2F; Peapod has <i>very</i> aggressive bot detection (probably to prevent just this) so I doubt this would work; I tend to trip it &quot;by accident&quot; just browsing the site and get completely locked out until I clear my cookies.

Had a &quot;oh shit&quot; moment reading the article. I live in Germany, and of course buy groceries. The &quot;discount&quot; games seem very obvious now. Food expenses have risen very significantly recently.<p>Great article, I hope this gains more traction and or legal ramifications for the grocers.

Would be nice to have this for all EU countries.

What are the legal ramifications grocery stores can realistically get into ?<p>Are there any examples of stores getting in trouble in the past? Did it actually solve anything ? Obviously the stores are not scared of any ramifications.

<p><pre><code> &gt; Then we also got German and Slovenian stores. </code></pre> Do they mean foreign companies operating in Austria, or separate DBs&#x2F;web sites for other countries? (The forks[1] don&#x27;t have legible names) I&#x27;d love to see a New Zealand one, as we have a big problem right now with rising cost of living and lots of suspicion of shenanigans.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;badlogic&#x2F;heissepreise&#x2F;forks">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;badlogic&#x2F;heissepreise&#x2F;forks</a>

In Czechia. Your poor neighbor is it exactly the same. Discounts. Consumer behavior. Bigger prices than in Germany and retailers making idiots from their customers.

Potatos ( in or outside supermarket, large bags ) have literally doubled in price YoY in NL.<p>I get 5kg instead of 10kg for the same price. Same month, last year.

Would be great to have the other EU countries added. Great for the consumer that is.

Lots of comments here saying Germany is 30 percent cheaper than Austria.<p>Isn’t living in Vienna much cheaper than living in big cities in Germany like Berlin and Munich?<p>So overall it’s still a better deal to live in Vienna than in Munich.

The most amazing thing is the suggestion of price collusion given the 1-cent changes in price from store to store that perfectly match one another.

That&#x27;s really shocking to me. Here in Germany the prices have gone up a bit but not hugely, and some things even went down a bit...

Maybe the immense task for such a database isn&#x27;t technical but to get the grocery chains on board.

Anyone know what the US market (no pun intended) is like? Similar games, different ones?

Someone needs to make something like this for Canada.

tl;dr it&#x27;s a scam.<p>Austria, is a zone of experimentation for large German companies like T-Mobile, REWE and friends.<p>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.<p>rant&#x2F; The same applies to literally the entire world now. With the &quot;new world order&quot; after COVID prices for literally everything have been on the rise, with ample excuses to justify this. Then the &quot;war&quot; in Ukraine came along and gave the greedy in the world yet another new set of excuses to justify increased prices.<p>Sure, there could have been rational justification to increase costs temporarily, but long term, it feels like a global, coordinated scam.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So since petrol and power now costs double, we can increase all the rest to go along with it, right? Sure, let&#x27;s do it!<p>Yeah, the politicians started yammering about how they&#x27;ll tax these extra profits but the bottom line will be that all of these huge corps will get away with it, and they&#x27;ll run away with tons of profits that they were never supposed to have.<p>Are we ever going to go down to pre-war&#x2F;pre-covid costs and prices? my estimate is that it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t wait! We&#x27;re going to elect you or your talented replacements as well next time, don&#x27;t worry about it!<p>The world is turning into Idiocracy fast, and the speed at which its heading there is only accelerating.<p>&#x2F;rant

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.

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.<p>Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets, so I can imagine they would fight and lobby politicians vigorously.

Funny how the two most pro-Russian EU countries, Hungary and Austria, are the ones suffering the worst inflation despite continuing to trade with Russia.<p>The only parts of the countries doing well are Budapest and Vienna that are both controlled by opposition parties.

Truly shows how Free Markets are the most efficient

“asymmetric information warfare”<p>I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.

[dupe]

If rampant inflation is what it takes to go full blown socialism (&quot;you&#x27;ll own nothing and you&#x27;ll like it&quot;) then so be it.

What&#x27;s the point of posting in English if the meat of the content (the screenshots) is not in English?