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Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector

• juujian 2y ago
  I'm sure there is a theory of how this would reduce prices - what is it? Real estate markets became infinitely more transparent over the last couple of years, to the extent that the data is used to train data scientist. The result? Speculators entered the market at it's messed up.
  • juliend2 2y ago
    Good point. But is there an oligopoly in the Canadian real estate market though? I assume the premise of Project Hammer is that transparency applied on the food industry would underline some collusion and invite for a debate on whether there's some legislation to apply against such an oligopoly.
    • boringg 2y ago
      Is the premise that the bread scandal is just the tip of the iceberg?
    • nickff 2y ago
      What would demonstrate collusion? Very similar prices could be a sign of close competition, and razor-thin margins. Varying prices could also be a sign of close competition, with grocers choosing loss-leaders to lure customers into the store.
      • cycomanic 2y ago
        Look at the data for Austria presented in the link in the article. Supermarkets raised and lowered prices on the same day to the exact same amount and lots of other pretty damning evidence.
        • nickff 2y ago
          Those instances do look suspicious, though it’s likely that both vendors were sourcing from the same supplier and/or one was matching their competitor’s pricing. I’d be interested to see what proportion of the own-brand goods this had happened for, whether the same store was always first to raise prices, and what their supply chains looked like.
        • Reason077 2y ago
          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.
          • abdullahkhalids 2y ago
            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.
            • kaibee 2y ago
              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.
    • juujian 2y ago
      I'm afraid it might have the opposite effect - made collusion easier.
  • gruez 2y ago
    >The result? Speculators entered the market at it's messed up. That seems like a stretch. What's the casual mechanism behind increased accessibility of data driving up prices? At least with something like stocks you could blame HFT firms piling into the market or whatever. It seems far more plausible that prices rose for other reasons (take your pick of: NIMBYism, immigration, foreign investors, etc.), and the increased accessibility of data happened to coincide with the price rise (ie. similar to https://xkcd.com/925/ https://xkcd.com/925/).
    • kreyenborgi 2y ago
      Imagine we sell groceries. If I have real-time access to your prices, and you to mine, then I have no incentive to try to outbid you to my customers since you will see my cheap potato sale sooner than my customers will, and announce your own equivalent sale. Knowing you have access to my prices, I can also increase them safe in the knowledge that you will follow me very soon, since that means we both win. That is how sharing prices with no friction leads to less competition.
  • hobs 2y ago
    That's not how that worked - real estate data was always fairly public and if you had enough money it was straightforward to hoover it up - the change in approach was more about the last housing crisis and then ZIRP buoying huge tech and real estate interests to drive into home buying in the first place. We had people who were underwater for years combined with a new market that cant afford the extremely high fixed costs and end up eventually paying rents higher than the mortgage in many principalities. If you have a ton of capital it makes perfect sense to park it in a place where you have a guaranteed return.
  • saghm 2y ago
    Is speculation as much of a concern for groceries? Real estate is an asset you can hold onto for a while, but I feel like buying up groceries just means you'll have a lot of expired food pretty soon if you can't find a buyer.
    • bobthepanda 2y ago
      This actually happened to onions in the US so now we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
      • saghm 2y ago
        This seems vaguely familiar now that I look at it, I must have read it (or an article on a similar phenomenon). Fair enough though, I'd be fine with a regulation like this along with stopping price collusion.
    • _yb2s 2y ago
      I'm feeling bearish on raw salmon
  • nosecreek 2y ago
    I’d be curious to hear more from OP on this as well. I’ve got my own price tracking site for Canadian groceries (http://grocerytracker.ca/ http://grocerytracker.ca/) but my primary goal has been to get information in the hands of average Canadians so they can make informed buying decisions.
• 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  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 intentionally to avoid comparisons.
  • IncreasePosts 2y ago
    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!
    • jfil 2y ago
      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!)
      • jjkaczor 2y ago
        Thanks for creating this - I have cross-posted a link to your site/project on Reddit to "/r/loblawsisoutofcontrol"
  • danudey 2y ago
    With 7z compression level 9, the .sqlite archive comes down to 61 MiB, which is about a 92% file size reduction.
• tomComb 2y ago
  Oh man, we really need this for telecom too. And even more important than their collusion is their political corruption, so the government protects them from competition and funnels endless billions in taxpayer money to them.
  • arcticbull 2y ago
    You know what actually works great for reducing the price of cell plans in Canada is a public option. There's one province where people pay roughly half the national average for all there telecom needs - and that's Saskatchewan. SaskTel's mere existence keeps all the majors in line. Manitobans should be absolutely up in arms over the privatization of Manitoba Telecom. Canada has a ton of land and just not that many people. There's 3 + Videotron major telecom operators servicing a population the size of California spread out over a land area the size of the United States. The Capex and payback period for spinning up a new, competitive, national carrier is wild (there's a pile of bodies there proving my point) which makes this a perfect job for the government.
    • gruez 2y ago
      >There's one province where people pay roughly half the national average for all there telecom needs - and that's Saskatchewan. SaskTel's mere existence keeps all the majors in line. Source? Looking at sasktel's website and rogers' website, this claim does not pass the sniff test. Their "basic" plan is $60/month (BYOD) for 15GB of data, whereas rogers gives you 75GB for $65. Even if you don't use 15GB of data and that extra $5 brings you no benefit, the price difference is nowhere near high enough to justify the claim "people pay roughly half the national average".
      • arcticbull 2y ago
        Probably marketing/promos for new customers vs. actual realized, and I strongly suspect if you click through those Rogers plans you'll land on a much higher total cost. https://hellosafe.ca/en/telecommunications/cell-phone-plans/data-price-map https://hellosafe.ca/en/telecommunications/cell-phone-plans/...
• peepeepoopoo83 2y ago
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• 4thgenrustcoder 2y ago
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• fallingknife 2y ago
  Why on earth are people and government stooges suddenly targeting grocery stores for collusion and price gouging? If there is an industry with a lower profit margin, I'm not aware of it.
  • contagiousflow 2y ago
    Are you Canadian or aware of the history of Canadian grocery chains?
  • gruez 2y ago
    cynical take: grocery prices are more salient to consumers because they see it every week, therefore governments target them to score political points with voters. That said, one of the government reports linked in the article[1] does mention that profit margins have edged up slightly, albeit on the order of 1-2 percentage points. [1] https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-competition/education-and-outreach/canada-needs-more-grocery-competition https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/how-we-foster-competiti...
  • ziddoap 2y ago
    Well, one reason is that Canada had a ~15 year bread price-fixing scandal come to light somewhat recently. And the same people that colluded on bread just so happen to sell other grocery goods. Some people think: "hey, maybe we should check out the other stuff they sell". Which seems reasonable to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada From an anecdotal standpoint, when many of the groceries I buy seem to have gone up in price at a rate well outpacing inflation, I can't help but wonder what the hell is going on.
    • arcticbull 2y ago
      Sure, but even during the price fixing period Loblaws' profit margin was sub-5%, and currently sits a 3.3%. Yes, it obviously shouldn't have happened, but there's no piñata of profit just waiting to be smashed apart that would magically drop grocery bills.
• 99_00 2y ago
  1. Online prices are not the same as in store prices 2. No one, other than random people in messages forums, is alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university, not the government, not the media. 3. The government’s investigation, which many of the conspiracy theorists site as evidence, shows a lack of competition led to 1 or 2 % increase in price over 12 years, and the vast majority of the price increases was due to things like war in Ukraine, Covid restrictions, fuel prices due to energy crisis.
  • throwaway201606 2y ago
    Want to give you benefit of the doubt with regards to phrasing but tackling each of these statements as they are all factually incorrect: > 1. Online prices are not the same as in store prices This depends but mostly they match ie online grocer prices in Canada are the same as in-store prices This is because most grocers have use online prices as flyers / ads / sales pricing for stores. Also, in Canada, because of price match policies from the grocers themselves, most grocers have to match their own online prices and, in many cases, competitor prices - this includes competitor online prices!!! including sales and flyer offers https://blog.flipp.com/7-canadian-grocery-stores-that-price-match-in-2022-and-where-you-can-save-a-lot-on-groceries/ https://blog.flipp.com/7-canadian-grocery-stores-that-price-... Further, there is - pricing law in Canada around charging more than advertised pricing https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-practices/types-deceptive-marketing-practices/sale-above-advertised-price https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-pra... - a pricing code of conduct: if an item is more expensive than the listed price, the consumer gets that first item for free. This means that grocers go out of their way to show the lowest correct possible price all the time everywhere. https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-practices/types-deceptive-marketing-practices/scanner-price-accuracy https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/deceptive-marketing-pra... The only exception I can think of is delivery prices where in-store pricing will not match the online pricing. But delivery is usually differentiated by completely different branding from the actual store eg Sobey's has the "Voila" brand for delivery and Metro has "metro.ca" as the delivery brand which is distinct from Metro. > 2. No one, other than random people in messages forums, is alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university, not the government, not the media." This is factually incorrect: grocer bread price fixing / collusion went to court and there was a $500m judgement https://globalnews.ca/news/10642801/loblaw-bread-price-fixing-class-action/amp/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10642801/loblaw-bread-price-fixin... > 3. The government’s investigation, which many of the conspiracy theorists site as evidence, shows a lack of competition led to 1 or 2 % increase in price over 12 years, and the vast majority of the price increases was due to things like war in Ukraine, Covid restrictions, fuel prices due to energy crisis. Price fixing preceded all these events. In cases being investigated e.g. bread which is now resolved, the period was as far as 15 years back. https://globalnews.ca/news/10642801/loblaw-bread-price-fixing-class-action/amp/ https://globalnews.ca/news/10642801/loblaw-bread-price-fixin...
• lushdogg 2y ago
  Email sent.
• hodder 2y ago
  "Project Hammer aims to drive more competition and reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector." In order to assess collusion among Canadian Grocers it is important to understand what gross margins have done, as input costs have run up materially as well. Canadian grocer margins have expanded materially, but nowhere near total food inflation costs. While groceries remain a competitive business in many countries, concentration in Canada has led to a material expansion of gross margins since the early 2010s from the low 20s to the low 30s: https://ycharts.com/companies/LBLCF/gross_profit_margin https://ycharts.com/companies/LBLCF/gross_profit_margin. This is a massive increase in gross margins no doubt, and reflects the concentration of market power in Canada, but it is also important to understand that the total food price increase is driven primarily by food itself increasing in price (COGS for grocers) and general CPI in Canada. Meaning Loblaws is driving a bigger wedge to themselves, as are other grocers, but the bigger problem is general dollar devaluation and food input costs to grocers. It is important to look at both aspects of this problem. Right now if you magically waived a wand to reduce prices by 10%, while cost of goods sold remained flat, it would basically wipe out 15 years of gross margin incease to grocers, but would barely benefit families struggling to feed themself (an extra 10 bucks per 100 spent). So yes grocers are a problem, but they arent the problem that politicians (NDP and Liberals especially) scape goat them to be. Federal fiscal and monetary policy is MUCH more likely to be the main culprit to food price increases, and most politicians should be looking in the mirror as opposed to simply blaming grocers (who are also to blame, but lets use pareto's principle here). Date Value June 30, 2024 33.13% March 31, 2024 32.80% December 31, 2023 32.16% September 30, 2023 31.38% June 30, 2023 32.22% March 31, 2023 32.37% December 31, 2022 31.56% September 30, 2022 31.48% June 30, 2022 32.34% March 31, 2022 32.03% December 31, 2021 31.76% September 30, 2021 31.30% June 30, 2021 31.71% March 31, 2021 31.15% December 31, 2020 30.17% September 30, 2020 29.92% March 31, 2020 30.86% December 31, 2019 30.91% September 30, 2019 30.37% June 30, 2019 31.00% March 31, 2019 30.70% December 31, 2018 30.75% September 30, 2018 29.94% June 30, 2018 30.77% March 31, 2018 30.26% Date Value December 31, 2017 29.82% September 30, 2017 29.02% June 30, 2017 29.22% March 31, 2017 29.45% December 31, 2016 28.81% September 30, 2016 27.91% June 30, 2016 28.24% March 31, 2016 28.77% December 31, 2015 27.92% September 30, 2015 27.05% June 30, 2015 27.67% March 31, 2015 28.14% December 31, 2014 27.63% September 30, 2014 26.27% June 30, 2014 19.75% March 31, 2014 24.51% December 31, 2013 23.91% September 30, 2013 23.15% June 30, 2013 23.64% March 31, 2013 23.99% December 31, 2012 23.23% September 30, 2012 23.29% June 30, 2012 23.63% March 31, 2012 23.83% December 31, 2011 23.18%
• magicalhippo 2y ago
  Top three grocery companies in Norway, which have almost the entire grocery market here between them, just got fined[1] for price collusion. They'd signal rising prices for a category by rising the price on certain products within that category, was one accusation. Extensive use of price scouts aided in this. Initially the fine was much larger, but ended up at about 450M USD total between the three. For comparison, the larger company had roughly the same amount as profit before taxes[2] in 2023. The recent heavy inflation in grocery prices has been far greater than what say the farmers got for the raw products. That said, here in Norway we have a ridiculous amount of smaller, local grocery stores, rather than fewer larger ones here and there. As I sit here, in the outskirts of Oslo, within a 15 minute walk I have 8 grocery stores, all from the top three. [1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/daglegvare-etterforskinga_-4_9-milliardar-i-gebyr-til-coop_-norgesgruppen-og-rema-1.17010641 https://www.nrk.no/norge/daglegvare-etterforskinga_-4_9-mill... [2]: https://www.dn.no/handel/resultathopp-for-norgesgruppen-tjente-43-milliarder-for-skatt/2-1-1615748 https://www.dn.no/handel/resultathopp-for-norgesgruppen-tjen...
  • jahnu 2y ago
    I am almost convinced this is happening here in Austria too. I have to be open to the possibility it’s just my imagination but damn it feels too suspicious at times. Haven’t seen anything in the news, however.
    • vjerancrnjak 2y ago
      There's a whole thread here on Austria: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275
  • acchow 2y ago
    For how many years did this collusion last? What percentage of their annual profit could be attributed to price collusion? Norgesgruppen's 2005 annual report shows a profit margin of 2.2%. In 2021, that ballooned to 3.8%. That's almost a 75% growth in margin.
    • 2y ago
• coding123 2y ago
  It's not the grocery stores creating this environment, it's their suppliers that have been consolidating non stop for 10 years. This is the real story: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/jul/14/food-monopoly-meals-profits-data-investigation https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/...
  • Marsymars 2y ago
    TBF in Canada grocery stores are also suppliers; about a quarter of sales are of private label items.
    • hello_computer 2y ago
      Both private-label and name-brand items are produced by 3rd-party suppliers.
      • Marsymars 2y ago
        Not necessarily, e.g. at various points George Weston Limited has owned commercial dairies and bakeries. They've also bought out suppliers of their private-label items after the suppliers went bankrupt due to insufficient margins.
• smeej 2y ago
  Doesn't making this data available also provide it to the grocers? Is it still "collusion" if they all just start raising their prices to public benchmarks on any items where they're low? They're not "working with each other" now. They're just "analyzing the publicly available data to remain competitive."
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Lalabadie 2y ago
    Canadian grocers already have sophisticated price watch tools all pointed at each other and augmented by human labor. This data set is from scraping online grocery store prices over a period of time, it's not live. It wouldn't improve grocer's price data harvesting, but it does slightly reduce the gap between what they have in hand, and what the public and press can have in hand.
• motohagiography 2y ago
  canada's attitude toward competition is different than that of the US though. our agricultural products (dairy, wheat, maple syrup, and to a lesser extent retail beer and alcohols) are controlled by state monopolies who set prices. the reason food is so expensive is because of fuel costs from the last few years, which were further not-helped by both an increase in federal taxes on fuel and the semi-official policy of weakening the CAD against the USD to support exports that weakens purchasing power. the effort appeals to economically illiterate constituents who support "price controls." if you want to know where canada is on its de-kulakization spiral, the state is blaming "price gougers" for its policy failures, next are hoarders, speculators and probably "international bankers," on the list of clichés.
  • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    People generally get the govts they deserve. Canadians are no different. i.e blame Canadians not their overlords.
    • webnrrd2k 2y ago
      Can't it be both?
      • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
        Well yes, it can be both. But overlords are a)universally corrupt b) they are always a minority. The overlords have their way only because the majority allow it. You will see these dynamics even in tiny groups where the minority loud/obnoxious individuals rise to power. Focusing on the overlords is almost always a distraction on the underlying issue - that of the the electorate being too stupid, or ignorant to realize that they are being taken advantage of.
    • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • 2y ago
• 1970-01-01 2y ago
  I read this title as "reduce collision in a Canadian grocery store" and thought this was an app for parking.
  • winddude 2y ago
    or shopping carts in the store, need to cut down on the number of sorries.
    • Scoundreller 2y ago
      No idea why people do not follow standard traffic conventions for right of way with a shopping cart (or while walking in general)
      • scohesc 2y ago
        It's honestly mindboggling. You're moving a four-wheeled vehicle down an aisle, with enough room for 2, maybe 2.5 cart widths. Yet people decide to stop right in the center without considering that they might be blocking someone. But I'm the jerk if I point it out. People are so silly (myself included)
• Reason077 2y ago
  > “It is an industry practice to have a price freeze from Nov. 1 to Feb. 5 for all private label and national brand grocery products, and this will be the case in all Metro outlets.” Sounds like Metro just admitted to illegal price collusion to me. If this isn’t illegal in Canada, perhaps the law is the problem?
• winddude 2y ago
  Interesting idea, I'm also in Canada, I briefly looked at extracting grocery store price info, don't forget that prices from the same retailer can vary greatly by geo and even locations. Also several stores, in store prices don't match online prices (costco is the obvious example, but nearly every store has in store exclusives that don't hit online advertising).
• chaostheory 2y ago
  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.
  • Scoundreller 2y ago
    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.ecodainc.ca/pulses/ https://www.ccga.ca/advocacy/trade https://www.ccga.ca/advocacy/trade https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wheat/reporter/can 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.
    • chaostheory 2y ago
      You’re right and I’m wrong, and there are other issues https://retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2024/07/why-foreign-grocers-arent-expanding-into-canada-op-ed/ https://retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2024/07/why-foreig...
  • jfil 2y ago
    I believe one of the key issues is anaemic anti-monopoly laws and enforcement. The grocery sector in Canada is very healthy and innovative, even without foreign entrants. It's just that any successful small chains get eaten up by the giants - "Adonis" got bought by Metro, "Farm Boy" got bought by Sobeys and "T&T" got bought by Loblaws. Any new threat gets eaten up by the big players.
    • VancouverMan 2y ago
      From what I remember of my occasional pre-acquisition visits to those chains, they certainly weren't competing on price. Their drawing power was due to offering ethnic and/or specialty foods (Middle Eastern and Mediterranean products for Adonis, Asian products for T&T, fresh products for Farm Boy) that weren't as common at the more established supermarkets. I remember being surprised at how expensive items generally were at those chains compared to the more established chains I tended to shop at at the time. For a customer like me seeking low prices, those smaller chains weren't viable or practical competitors to the larger chains. I'd only end up there as a last resort, typically while travelling and facing time constraints.
• a13n 2y ago
  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 big guys. As a result, they have crazy shitty experiences. Telecoms are frustratingly expensive for cable and mobile services. Banks are dreadful and charge fees left and right, for basic things that are free in the US. Customer support with any of these companies is terrible. I'm not surprised that they are colluding on pricing. It's quite obvious in the telecom market at least. It seems tricky from the gov's perspective because this oligopoly/collusion behavior likely fuels higher GDP and more tax revenue... but ultimately more competition and consumer protection would make for a better country to live in.
  • FredPret 2y ago
    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.
    • squigz 2y ago
      > 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?
    • VancouverMan 2y ago
      The numerous problems that Canada is facing today are ultimately caused by government interference. While we've certainly seen technology cause and enable change in the private sector, the public sector can basically just ignore disruptive technologies without any real consequences. If the public sector ever did face any sort of real disruption due to technology, the public sector would likely just regulate away the technology that's causing them problems. The situation is made worse by a big proportion of the Canadian population being heavily dependent, directly or indirectly, on large and inefficient government. This includes much of the mainstream media, in addition to the overtly government-controlled services (education, health care, policing, etc.), and government itself (politicians, bureaucrats, etc.). These people have no incentive for positive change, and actually a lot of incentive for things to get much worse than they already are. I think it'll be a mix of economic and demographic factors that eventually result in change, rather than technological factors. Decades of awful immigration policies have created a society in Canada that's now extremely fractured, well beyond the traditional (and mild in comparison) English/French divide that has already caused enough problems in the past. Eventually, the already-severe economic inefficiency imposed by government will become unsustainable, and economic troubles will result in "Balkanization" occurring. It will be particularly bad in parts of Ontario and BC, where we already see this beginning to happen.
• huitzitziltzin 2y ago
  ‘’’ 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.
  • jfil 2y ago
    Hey man, I'm just creating the hammer - you can throw it in the lake, make a treehouse for your kid, smash a window, up to you :-D
    • huitzitziltzin 2y ago
      Assuming you’re the author (and again this is a nice idea!) there is a paper you should check out. This paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20170116 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20170116 Is the best case scenario (=easiest) for the exercise you want to do and will illustrate what is hard about the grocery case. In the paper there is: - One product - one clearly isolated market. - four or five firms. - A clear mechanism for collusion (a government price sharing website). Even then there is no statistical or econometric test out of the box which “shows collusion”. It’s a great paper (both in my opinion and that’s why it got into AER) but there is nothing they do that says “hey here’s collusion based on this t-stat.” The grocery case (overlapping markets, thousands of products, many firms) is vastly, vastly harder.
    • huitzitziltzin 2y ago
• adamomada 2y ago
  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.
  • BigFnTelly 2y ago
    beerboss.ca picked up the torch
  • mistermann 2y ago
    > And were shut down by a threat of a lawsuit. As is the will of people, since Canada is a democracy, and that's what democracies do. Not like those terrible communist governments. Everyone should well know what they do (and how your friendly local neighborhood democracy is so much better, you see), you can read about it in your newspaper quite literally every single day for the last several years/decades. Threads like these are diamonds in the rough, I love collecting them.
• sys32768 2y ago
  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.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • arcticbull 2y ago
    > Edit: I have also witnessed Canadians in awe at how inexpensive was the stack of chewing tobacco they purchased. Sin taxes vary across Canada and across the US. Even within the US the range is $6 to $12 [1] per pack of cigarettes. In Canada [2] the range is $8.60 USD to $11.74 USD per pack. Were they to declare on the way back as required by law, I strongly suspect it would have been cheaper to buy at home. [1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/cigarette-prices-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/cigarette-p... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1307607/canada-regional-price-of-cigarettes/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1307607/canada-regional-...
  • campl3r 2y ago
    that's shocking to me. I, a European, recently spent multiple months on the west coast in the US and Canada, Canada was significantly cheaper. I'd guess West Coast prices in the US are just even more expensive? (Guessing based on them being 5-20x of german prices for basic groceries)
• scotty79 2y ago
  Publishing catalogue of prices of the products you sell should be mandatory condition to be able to do any selling.
• delichon 2y ago
  Say I set my apple prices at 0.5 standard deviations below the average prices I can find in the vicinity. Is that an attempt to undercut the market or collude with it? If I set the price to the average, is that collusion or just trying to maximize my profit on apples? If I set it higher than average, is that collusion, or me telling the market that I think I have premium apples? How do you get from correlation to collusion? This project seems to build on an assumption that it is collusive to set prices based on other market prices, or else how could it be a hammer to bash collusion? Is it required to be ignorant of market prices when you set a price so that regulators can assume that correlation is evidence of an agreement?
  • seabass-labrax 2y ago
    Does that matter except as a philosophical question? The point of a free market in practice is to ensure that sale values are correlated with, and reasonably close to, production costs. If an ostensibly free market is not producing competition which causes that to happen, it's a problem for society; then, it is society's prerogative to use whatever means appropriate to fix it. That could include, depending on the ideology of the society, loans and grants for new participants in the market, legislation that regulates pricing, specific taxation policies, or even rejecting the free market entirely and moving to central control. By analogy, a mysterious violent crime case might need to be solved for justice to be attained, but it doesn't need to be solved in order for a society to improve and make itself safer generally.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • smbullet 2y ago
      Your premise is wrong. The point of a free market is to allow supply and demand to accurately determine pricing. It is not a desired effect of the free market for production costs to always correlate or even be close to the price of goods or services. Changes in supply and/or demand can cause costs and prices to trend in opposite directions.
• SG- 2y ago
  i like this but it's only tracking price changes for the final sale price. there's so much movement in grocery stores when it comes to supplier and product costs that will show the whole picture. you'd have to have someone who has access to the internal systems that could also track the profit on each item and track that.
• islewis 2y ago
  Big fan of any data aggregation projects like this, especially with such a relatable theme. However it feel like the conclusion might be jumping the gun a bit. Instead of "Think there is collusion" -> finding the data top support the claim, maybe run the numbers first and see what they say? I think coming up with a strong position (Canadian stores are colluding) before looking at the data makes it enticing to find numbers that back up the claim, whether or not they are taken out of context.
  • mb7733 2y ago
    We know they have been colluding, the question is on what other kinds of goods? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada
    • islewis 2y ago
      Thanks for the context. I'm still not certain that an instance of collusion on the price of bread in 2015 implies wider collusion in 2024. Ideally, the data would be proving this, but I guess my skepticism is the cost of making a claim before the research is done.
      • jfil 2y ago
        I'm the creator, and I think you are spot-on. It is my wish that this data will help increase competition/reduce collusion, but until others analyze it we cannot make assumptions about what prices/grocers are doing.
      • mb7733 2y ago
        Your point stands, but it wasn't an "instance of collusion on the price of bread in 2015", but widespread collusion on the price bread and other baked goods from 2001-2015 (some say 2017), which was discovered in 2015.
• constantlm 2y ago
  This could be useful for New Zealand too, where things are even worse and a duopoly effectively controls the whole market. Might put this on my ever-growing list of projects I want to do.
• 486sx33 2y ago
  It’s pretty simple 1. Land area is huge in Canada, you can’t build a startup distribution network at scale and be efficient (ask target) 2. Interprovincial trade barriers 3. Everything has to have the French language printed on it - even if the closest supplier to Alberta is Montana, you can’t just import stuff without different inspection and packaging. This centralizes everything imported in Canada to things like the Toronto distribution center of which most foodstuffs only increase in cost the further across Canada from Toronto you get 4. Smaller grocery stores have tried, and the reasons above, plus the massive amounts of corporate welfare that companies like sobeys and loblaws get make the market unbalanced and unfriendly to competition.
• andrew_ 2y ago
  Was just in Canada recently and despite the favorable exchange rate, I couldn't believe how expensive groceries were compared to the states. Everything from juice to eggs to bread to meat was 1.5 - 2x the cost back home.
• tamimio 2y ago
  I started with something similar a while ago but stopped as I got busy. It’s something I noticed, and I usually don’t pay much attention to grocery prices, or at least I used to. What made me pay attention was a chocolate bar I used to get for around $4. Then I didn’t buy it for a year, only to find out it’s around $7 now! I always wonder why no one speaks up about that. There are plenty of government employees who are living paycheck to paycheck, yet no one is saying a thing.
  • jml7c5 2y ago
    The cost of cocoa beans skyrocketed this year because of bad weather. There is a huge production shortfall. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-31/why-cocoa-prices-spiked-and-what-it-means-for-chocolate-lovers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-31/why-cocoa...
    • tamimio 2y ago
      Not the chocolate please!!
  • jfil 2y ago
    I encourage you to initiate those conversations with your friends and acquaintances. They've probably felt that something is going off the rails but might feel disheartened that no one seems to notice. The solution to this problem starts with talking to each other about the existence of the problem.
    • tamimio 2y ago
      Yeah, I’m guilty of not doing that, which is why I wanted to create some sort of tracker as a personal project. I even got the domain and started scraping some data too. But I agree, it should be one of the main topics that most people talk about because otherwise, it won’t change.
  • Fricken 2y ago
    At the 2 major chain Canadian grocery stores I regularly visit (Save-On and Superstore) prices can vary wildly every time I'm at the store. With Chocolate bars, coffee and butter the price fluctuations are especially violent. I'm not up to date on Cocoa or Coffee bean futures, but the Canadian butter supply chain is not so unstable that the price ought to be varying from $5.50 to $8.50 on a regular basis! I'm not even sure what kind of game it is they're trying to play. Like, what are they hoping to achieve by jerking their customers around this way?
• zeckalpha 2y ago
  Are converging prices a sign of collusion, competition, or is it an orthogonal measure? My impression is price convergence is orthogonal to the collusion-competition dimension.
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    > 1. Compile a database of historical grocery prices from top grocers’ websites. > 2. Make the database available in a format that is suitable for academic analysis and for legal action. Price discovery for any reason is good I dont think the allegations are worth going into, the dataset should exist regardless
• acyou 2y ago
  Isn't coordinated price setting across a wide range of interchangeable commodities with elastic demand curves a particularly efficient form of price discovery? What would be a better mechanism of price discovery for such a group of commodities? I have never viewed an ad match policy with suspicion. Real assets, on the other hand... Love the data collection project, suspect the foregone conclusion. If we're so convinced already, data may not change anything.
• nightowl_games 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Co-operatives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Co-operatives They are not a private company, they run the store as a member owned cooperative. I'm a member, for instance. I have a number and get a discount and some cash back at the end of the year. If this theory of collusion is true, the coop should be cheaper then right? It's not! Loblaws is typically the cheapest.
• glitchc 2y ago
  Heck, I had totally forgotten that IGA and A&P used to exist.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    A&P until 2015, at which point they went bankrupt: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%26P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%26P> IGA still exist: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGA,_Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGA,_Inc.>
• xp84 2y ago
  If Canada is anything like the U.S. the snag I think you'll hit in establishing answers to questions like "what does this pound of butter cost at X chain" is that supermarkets now play so many games with pricing that there isn't one answer! 1. Prices may be regionally or locally varying based on, I assume, either inventory management needs or their idea of what people in one area will tolerate. 2. Pricing gimmicks. At my local supermarket, a standard bag of potato chips is $6.99 or so, but during some phases of the moon it becomes "$1.99 WHEN YOU BUY 4." Other products, a lot of packaged goods, go on sale in bundles: An item that may be $4.99 will be "$1.99 WHEN YOU BUY 5" participating products which may be chosen from certain unrelated stuff, like crackers, Tide, and Pillsbury biscuits. It's up to you to scrutinize the circular, the shelves don't always enumerate the eligible products. And finally, the best one, the "with digital coupon" prices. All you have to do is get on a sluggish app in terrible cell service, get properly signed in (oh, be sure to check your email because we needed to send you a 'security code') and locate and 'clip' the coupon and then you get a sale price. If you forget to do that you'll pay full price. So in the above situations I'm concerned what kind of data integrity one would get because different consumers will pay different amounts. For instance, not everyone has room to transport 4 bags of chips home, so they may end up spending $7 for 1 instead of $8 for 4. Therefore the chips are simultaneously $2 and $7.
• willvarfar 2y ago
  Here is an app idea: Users use a smartphone app to zap the price labels on shelves in shops. The app can provide basic price history and comparison prices etc. Furthermore, users could organise into little community groups. The app is tracking what is a good price and what is a good shelf life etc and what is in demand and what is on specific members shopping lists etc and tells the zapper how many to buy for a common stockroom. Of course the supermarkets will not like people wandering about their shop with an app, but they have a pretty ugly PR problem telling people they aren't allowed to use the app in their store etc?
  • fakedang 2y ago
    Monetization? I explored that idea before, but soon discovered it's hard to charge customers already looking to save money. Yet unfortunately, what's easier and more lucrative is selling that same data to the retailers to keep your lights on.
    • willvarfar 2y ago
      Perhaps this could be an unmonetized activist-programmed app. Or, with big VC backing, in some markets you could set up a mail-out retailer that is just undercutting shelf prices. You have the data on who is buying what and how much they are paying, and you are providing the organisational glue for community group buying and stockrooms, so you could be getting into being a virtual supermarket without renting any retail space?
      • fakedang 2y ago
        Explored that idea also. The fact is that the majority of big brand retailers do not make most of their revenue from selling products, but from selling shelf space. Margins on products are often very low, in the 2-5% ranges. But selling a single 1 meter length shelf space would generate thousands of dollars in revenue annually. That's not something you can charge for easily for an online store.
        • 2y ago
• kwar13 2y ago
  Never forget that these !@#$* price fixed bread for years, and got away by offering a $25 gift card. No one went to jail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada And that's just what could be proven in court.
  • jfil 2y ago
    Last year, Canada Bread paid $50mil for its role in price fixing: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1.6883783 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-bread-price-fixing-1... The government hasn't taken anyone to court yet, but justice and progress is possible. We will get there by continuing to talk about this and asking fellow Canadians to reflect on the state of our society.
• openrisk 2y ago
  You will need a Project Mjölnir for that, as the real ideology, moral stance and practice of our era is that competition is for losers. Or: Those who can't collude, compete.
• kinnth 2y ago
  This would be useful in all retail sectors. Things like DIY tools or raw materials along with components or chemicals. Most components or parts such as Graphics Cards already have strong price competition as you can buy it and get it shipped from anywhere. It is usually the local, raw materials where collusion is strongest.
• scottmsul 2y ago
  Suppose all the groceries raised the price of item X by exactly the same percent Y on the same day. At first glance this would look like perfect collusion in the data. But how do you know it wasn't just the supplier price going up by Y percent?
• iambateman 2y ago
  A lot of people are mentioning how hard collusion is to prove. Perhaps the government should offer a $500,000 incentive to anyone offering information which demonstrates collusion of a sufficient size. If consumers are getting systematically ripped off at a scale of many billions of dollars, it seems like we should try to just buy that information rather than pay a few dozen Ph.D’s to build models which demonstrate collusion. Knowing that employees are one email away from the biggest payday of their lives would have a deterrent effect on executive behavior, too.
• rekabis 2y ago
  I have been wanting to do something similar to this for years now, in terms of long-term price appreciation against inflation and shrinkflation. Unfortunately, this would have required product data and in-store price data going back decades. And done likely against the wishes of grocery chains, which would have required volunteers to go in and surreptitiously record prices across the country, not something easily doable without a modern smartphone.