Bartholomew Gallacher
Well-known member
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Inflation is a thing since the pandemic, and more so the start of the Ukraine war everywhere. The Austiran government promised in May this year to open up a public price comparison portal in collaboration with the biggest market chains, updated once a week and for 16 product categories only for everybody in fall this year, because setting this is up such a "enormous and challenging task."
So a developer named Mario Zechner said "Hold my beer!", and had the first working prototype ready within two hours in May 2023 after he read the announcement for the two biggest chains in Austria with all products. Since then he's been crawling the public available price data of important products in supermarkets and the biggest chains to run his analyses. People soon flocked about it, contributed their data pools as well and - how surprising - things looks really nasty. He's also updating his stuff once a day, and using much more categories and chains than what his government was planning to do.
First he wanted that a NGO takes over the project and acts as legal shield, but since no such NGO was willing to he just published the data by himself, created a portal and opensourced the whole source code as well. He's also covering German and Slovenian supermarkets, basically large scale analyses now on much stuff going back for years.
His findings are that most likely - no wonder - the chains are acting as cartel, and therefore the market is not working. More surprising though is, that e.g. Red Bulll, an Austrian brand produced in Austria is up to 40% cheaper in Germany at normal price than in Austria discounted. And this goes for much stuff made in Austria. Also many price increases are way higher tham the energy price increase alone.
I am pretty sure much of his findings are applicable to America and other counries as well.
mastodon.gamedev.place
Link to his price portal: Heisse Preise
Basically the guy proofed using tons of data and applying data science to it that greed inflation is happening at large scale right now. Since he was able to observe the "one chain does a thing, soon others will follow prompty" game everywhere he concludes that the chains have such tools working in-house as well.
So a developer named Mario Zechner said "Hold my beer!", and had the first working prototype ready within two hours in May 2023 after he read the announcement for the two biggest chains in Austria with all products. Since then he's been crawling the public available price data of important products in supermarkets and the biggest chains to run his analyses. People soon flocked about it, contributed their data pools as well and - how surprising - things looks really nasty. He's also updating his stuff once a day, and using much more categories and chains than what his government was planning to do.
First he wanted that a NGO takes over the project and acts as legal shield, but since no such NGO was willing to he just published the data by himself, created a portal and opensourced the whole source code as well. He's also covering German and Slovenian supermarkets, basically large scale analyses now on much stuff going back for years.
His findings are that most likely - no wonder - the chains are acting as cartel, and therefore the market is not working. More surprising though is, that e.g. Red Bulll, an Austrian brand produced in Austria is up to 40% cheaper in Germany at normal price than in Austria discounted. And this goes for much stuff made in Austria. Also many price increases are way higher tham the energy price increase alone.
I am pretty sure much of his findings are applicable to America and other counries as well.
Mario Zechner (@badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place)
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...
mastodon.gamedev.place
Link to his price portal: Heisse Preise
Basically the guy proofed using tons of data and applying data science to it that greed inflation is happening at large scale right now. Since he was able to observe the "one chain does a thing, soon others will follow prompty" game everywhere he concludes that the chains have such tools working in-house as well.
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