7 ms·

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

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. My guess, nothing, as the government regulators who are supposed to watch over this, will find nothing wrong, as they're already bought and paid for to go work as lobbyists or "consultants" for these retailers once their stint in politics is over. Why do I think this? Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed. The country is so corrupt, it's rotten to the core. As a consumer and taxpayer you are being legally fleeced form every direction with the blessing of the government, but this is probably true in many other countries.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  If the retail stores are price fixing then why are their stock prices down so much this year? Their investors are getting savaged. What did they do with all this extra cashflow?
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    My guess is because in Germany they're taking a loss due to actual competition, and making it up in other countries like Austria where they rake in higher profits than in their home-land.
    - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
      So anti-competitive practices are the norm in Austria but no one would dare try it in Germany? Truly bizarre theory.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        I never said nobody tried price fixing in Germany, but when it comes to consumer pricing in retail, my take is that Germany has a bigger market with more competition meaning the retailers can stomach increased competition and lower margins making it up in sheer volume. Smaller countries like Austria have much less competition, less volume sales, meaning more space for monopolies to form to charge higher prices.
        iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        what happened to the Common Market
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Common market means that Apple can't charge for iCloud to Sweden more expensively (before tax) than what they charge to Spain, it doesn't mean that goods made in one country of the union can't have way different pricing in another based on shipping, VAT, taxes, labor, supply/demand, or straight up price gouging.
        iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        I'm talking about laws and enforcement of laws against anti-competitive practices like price fixing. Either enforcement is wildly different and there's a shitload of money to be made by undercutting the Austrian grocery cartel or the price fixing theory is just a socialist talking point.
        em-bee 3y ago
        but in order to do that for groceries you have to open shops in austria which makes it much more difficult compared to products that can be sold online.
  - orangepurple 3y ago
    Stock prices have nothing really to do with the company itself. Stock is issued by companies, but the value of a stock is proportional to the expected future hype value of the stock. Given sufficient hype, more people will buy in to it after you buy it, and the unit price of the limited stock issue goes up. Stock picking is simply gambling for retail investors which have zero say in how a company is run.
    - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
      According to the conspiracy theory, investors would see HUGE profit margins and they wouldn't rebalance their portfolio to get in on that? Why does the conspiracy theory rely on all investors being completely immune to earnings and allergic to profits? Why are earnings reports such a massive deal normally but in the grocery business nobody cares? Or why would investors assume that the huge earnings are very temporary and do not improve the longer-term outlook? The amount of cope in this thread is truly unfathomable. Just straight up economic illiteracy.
      - orangepurple 3y ago
        Stocks crash on bad earnings reports because the future attractiveness of the stock has diminished. This reduces the likelihood that a future investor will buy your hot potato above the unit price they bought in. Stocks are fundamentally divorced from economic reality EXCEPT when a company ceases trading and several other rare administrative actions. Predicting future hype is all that matters. Or time spent fractionally invested in all broader casino hype trains, e.g. VTI
        iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        Why in the motherfuck would it be a bad earnings report when, according to this conspiracy theory, gross margins on food would have gone from 1% to 43%? Conservatively that would lead to a ten thousand percent increase in the stock price. Yet instead the stocks of Metro AG and SPAR Group, Inc. are down 25 or more percent YTD.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
  > Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed. I would love a citation for that.
  - lxgr 3y ago
    German-only [1], but Google Translate gets the gist of it [2]. [1] https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1684683/index.html https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1684683/index.html [2] https://helpv2-orf-at.translate.goog/stories/1684683/index.html?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=eo&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://helpv2-orf-at.translate.goog/stories/1684683/index.h...
    - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
      If we are talking about that story, that is 12 years ago, not 6 and relates to a different fee structure, not raising of prices. So while I agree that this is a terrible development, I'm not sure that's what we're discussing here. More specifically after 2011 there was a huge downwards pressure on the market coming from increasing competition from virtual operators with decreasing prices.
      - lxgr 3y ago
        > relates to a different fee structure, not raising of prices Are you really arguing that all operators introduced a yearly fee of exactly the same amount, and in a very short period of time, was somehow perfectly balanced out by a drop in monthly rates, and on average nobody ended up paying more? Yes, Austria in general has a very healthy competitive market for mobile phone plans, but this particular move just looks extremely coordinated.
        the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
        > Are you really arguing that all operators introduced a yearly fee of exactly the same amount, and in a very short period of time, was somehow perfectly balanced out by a drop in monthly rates, and on average nobody ended up paying more? I'm arguing that after 2011 when the first operator introduced those fees, the cost of mobile phone plans decreased for many years until around 2019. It's also that not all operators introduced those fees and not all operators did at the same time. The main reason why many operators started charging with this fee structure is pretty obvious: it makes the monthly cost appear lower than it is. It's a form of sanctioned price in-transparency. //EDIT: the main reason for the introduction of that Servicepauschale was that for a while internet service providers where required to participate in the now illegal "Vorratesdatenspeicherung". The pauschale was generally understood to cover the cost of the infrastructure for it.
- lxgr 3y ago
  > Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can How was it not blatantly obvious that something is off if the exact same product from an Austrian manufacturer (not owned an international conglomerate) is consistently 20-30% cheaper in a grocery store in Berlin than it is in Vienna, minutes away from the factory where it's produced? I'm honestly surprised that it took the recent inflation for people in Austria to get wise to the fact that they've been overpaying on groceries for at least a decade. Especially in the western federal states bordering Germany I would have expected people to regularly go grocery shopping across the border (although supermarket prices aren't uniform within Germany; I have no anecdata about Bavaria, for example).
  - jsdwarf 3y ago
    Its very common for people from Salzburg/Austria to shop in the Berchtesgaden region, however with bigger distances from the border this doesn't make sense. Re Austrian products cheaper abroad than in Austria - there was the curious case of a beer drink from Gösser, that was sold cheaper 700km away from the brewery in Berlin than in the town of the brewery itself: https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/photo/1 https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/phot.... Gösser argued they wanted to promote the drink in Germany against local competition and that this was a temporary price drop. Again, Germany made a smarter move by developing beer powder concentrate (https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neuzelle-alkohol-wann-supermarkt-transport-kosten-sparen-wasser-brandenburg-zr-92174347.html https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neu... German). This allows them to remove the 90% water share of the beer when exporting it to Asia and still sell it as "brewed in Germany".
- nebula8804 3y ago
  Wow it feels as if you are writing about the US. Guess "the grass is always greener" and all that.
- gsich 3y ago
  >Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. Well they could prove it (ie take the receipt with you), but got lame excuses for why is's cheaper in Germany.
- parineum 3y ago
  > as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. The data does not clearly show that at all. It shows the expected result of inflation in a competitive market. When Company A decides that it's time to raise prices on Product B due to inflation (maybe their wholesale price went up), Company C, being under the same market pressures to raise prices, also raises their price but, because they still want to be competitive, they don't raise them beyond Company A. Reacting to the market isn't collusion, anti-competitive or anti-consumer. If you just reverse the direction the prices are going, it seems a lot less sinister and it's still the exact same inputs/outputs. The whole thread is made of points like that, especially the "asymmetrical information warfare" bit. He's scraping the websites for this data, right? Obviously that information is available at home. Moreover, the situation has actually dramatically improved because of the internet. You can now put together a cart on two different websites and go to the cheaper store if you'd like. Try doing that twenty years ago. I used to have to read the weekly ad to know these things, now I can just look online. The _only_ point that's being made is that Austrian prices are a bit higher than other nations and, for some reason, he thinks it's because the companies are conspiring in some way and not that it's, for some reason, more expensive for those companies to operate in Austria. That seems like the obvious solution to me since they appear to have a competitive market with a few major players.

>it shows the power of smart, tech-capable citizens Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. My guess, nothing, as the government regulators who are supposed to watch over this, will find nothing wrong, as they're already bought and paid for to go work as lobbyists or "consultants" for these retailers once their stint in politics is over. Why do I think this? Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed. The country is so corrupt, it's rotten to the core. As a consumer and taxpayer you are being legally fleeced form every direction with the blessing of the government, but this is probably true in many other countries.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago
If the retail stores are price fixing then why are their stock prices down so much this year? Their investors are getting savaged. What did they do with all this extra cashflow?
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  My guess is because in Germany they're taking a loss due to actual competition, and making it up in other countries like Austria where they rake in higher profits than in their home-land.
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    So anti-competitive practices are the norm in Austria but no one would dare try it in Germany? Truly bizarre theory.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      I never said nobody tried price fixing in Germany, but when it comes to consumer pricing in retail, my take is that Germany has a bigger market with more competition meaning the retailers can stomach increased competition and lower margins making it up in sheer volume. Smaller countries like Austria have much less competition, less volume sales, meaning more space for monopolies to form to charge higher prices.
      - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        what happened to the Common Market
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        Common market means that Apple can't charge for iCloud to Sweden more expensively (before tax) than what they charge to Spain, it doesn't mean that goods made in one country of the union can't have way different pricing in another based on shipping, VAT, taxes, labor, supply/demand, or straight up price gouging.
        iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        I'm talking about laws and enforcement of laws against anti-competitive practices like price fixing. Either enforcement is wildly different and there's a shitload of money to be made by undercutting the Austrian grocery cartel or the price fixing theory is just a socialist talking point.
        em-bee 3y ago
        but in order to do that for groceries you have to open shops in austria which makes it much more difficult compared to products that can be sold online.
- orangepurple 3y ago
  Stock prices have nothing really to do with the company itself. Stock is issued by companies, but the value of a stock is proportional to the expected future hype value of the stock. Given sufficient hype, more people will buy in to it after you buy it, and the unit price of the limited stock issue goes up. Stock picking is simply gambling for retail investors which have zero say in how a company is run.
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    According to the conspiracy theory, investors would see HUGE profit margins and they wouldn't rebalance their portfolio to get in on that? Why does the conspiracy theory rely on all investors being completely immune to earnings and allergic to profits? Why are earnings reports such a massive deal normally but in the grocery business nobody cares? Or why would investors assume that the huge earnings are very temporary and do not improve the longer-term outlook? The amount of cope in this thread is truly unfathomable. Just straight up economic illiteracy.
    - orangepurple 3y ago
      Stocks crash on bad earnings reports because the future attractiveness of the stock has diminished. This reduces the likelihood that a future investor will buy your hot potato above the unit price they bought in. Stocks are fundamentally divorced from economic reality EXCEPT when a company ceases trading and several other rare administrative actions. Predicting future hype is all that matters. Or time spent fractionally invested in all broader casino hype trains, e.g. VTI
      - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
        Why in the motherfuck would it be a bad earnings report when, according to this conspiracy theory, gross margins on food would have gone from 1% to 43%? Conservatively that would lead to a ten thousand percent increase in the stock price. Yet instead the stocks of Metro AG and SPAR Group, Inc. are down 25 or more percent YTD.
the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
> Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed. I would love a citation for that.
- lxgr 3y ago
  German-only [1], but Google Translate gets the gist of it [2]. [1] https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1684683/index.html https://helpv2.orf.at/stories/1684683/index.html [2] https://helpv2-orf-at.translate.goog/stories/1684683/index.html?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=eo&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://helpv2-orf-at.translate.goog/stories/1684683/index.h...
  - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    If we are talking about that story, that is 12 years ago, not 6 and relates to a different fee structure, not raising of prices. So while I agree that this is a terrible development, I'm not sure that's what we're discussing here. More specifically after 2011 there was a huge downwards pressure on the market coming from increasing competition from virtual operators with decreasing prices.
    - lxgr 3y ago
      > relates to a different fee structure, not raising of prices Are you really arguing that all operators introduced a yearly fee of exactly the same amount, and in a very short period of time, was somehow perfectly balanced out by a drop in monthly rates, and on average nobody ended up paying more? Yes, Austria in general has a very healthy competitive market for mobile phone plans, but this particular move just looks extremely coordinated.
      - the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
        > Are you really arguing that all operators introduced a yearly fee of exactly the same amount, and in a very short period of time, was somehow perfectly balanced out by a drop in monthly rates, and on average nobody ended up paying more? I'm arguing that after 2011 when the first operator introduced those fees, the cost of mobile phone plans decreased for many years until around 2019. It's also that not all operators introduced those fees and not all operators did at the same time. The main reason why many operators started charging with this fee structure is pretty obvious: it makes the monthly cost appear lower than it is. It's a form of sanctioned price in-transparency. //EDIT: the main reason for the introduction of that Servicepauschale was that for a while internet service providers where required to participate in the now illegal "Vorratesdatenspeicherung". The pauschale was generally understood to cover the cost of the infrastructure for it.
lxgr 3y ago
> Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can How was it not blatantly obvious that something is off if the exact same product from an Austrian manufacturer (not owned an international conglomerate) is consistently 20-30% cheaper in a grocery store in Berlin than it is in Vienna, minutes away from the factory where it's produced? I'm honestly surprised that it took the recent inflation for people in Austria to get wise to the fact that they've been overpaying on groceries for at least a decade. Especially in the western federal states bordering Germany I would have expected people to regularly go grocery shopping across the border (although supermarket prices aren't uniform within Germany; I have no anecdata about Bavaria, for example).
- jsdwarf 3y ago
  Its very common for people from Salzburg/Austria to shop in the Berchtesgaden region, however with bigger distances from the border this doesn't make sense. Re Austrian products cheaper abroad than in Austria - there was the curious case of a beer drink from Gösser, that was sold cheaper 700km away from the brewery in Berlin than in the town of the brewery itself: https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/photo/1 https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/phot.... Gösser argued they wanted to promote the drink in Germany against local competition and that this was a temporary price drop. Again, Germany made a smarter move by developing beer powder concentrate (https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neuzelle-alkohol-wann-supermarkt-transport-kosten-sparen-wasser-brandenburg-zr-92174347.html https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neu... German). This allows them to remove the 90% water share of the beer when exporting it to Asia and still sell it as "brewed in Germany".
nebula8804 3y ago
Wow it feels as if you are writing about the US. Guess "the grass is always greener" and all that.
gsich 3y ago
>Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. Well they could prove it (ie take the receipt with you), but got lame excuses for why is's cheaper in Germany.
parineum 3y ago
> as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing. The data does not clearly show that at all. It shows the expected result of inflation in a competitive market. When Company A decides that it's time to raise prices on Product B due to inflation (maybe their wholesale price went up), Company C, being under the same market pressures to raise prices, also raises their price but, because they still want to be competitive, they don't raise them beyond Company A. Reacting to the market isn't collusion, anti-competitive or anti-consumer. If you just reverse the direction the prices are going, it seems a lot less sinister and it's still the exact same inputs/outputs. The whole thread is made of points like that, especially the "asymmetrical information warfare" bit. He's scraping the websites for this data, right? Obviously that information is available at home. Moreover, the situation has actually dramatically improved because of the internet. You can now put together a cart on two different websites and go to the cheaper store if you'd like. Try doing that twenty years ago. I used to have to read the weekly ad to know these things, now I can just look online. The _only_ point that's being made is that Austrian prices are a bit higher than other nations and, for some reason, he thinks it's because the companies are conspiring in some way and not that it's, for some reason, more expensive for those companies to operate in Austria. That seems like the obvious solution to me since they appear to have a competitive market with a few major players.