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One of the things I hate most about living in Norway are the food prices and selection. The government allows two main cooperatives: Tine - milk and dairy prod
by tallanvor 11y ago
One of the things I hate most about living in Norway are the food prices and selection. The government allows two main cooperatives: Tine - milk and dairy products, and Nortua - meat products, to monopolize the market, and maintain high tariffs that prevent foreign foods from offering price competition. This allows farmers to maintain small, inefficient farms that produce rather substandard products (Norwegian beef is about as tasteless as you can find).
For dairy, a smaller company Q started about 15 years ago and is probably helping to keep milk prices down a bit since Tine actually has some competition now, but not nearly enough to bring prices down to what you would find across the border in Sweden, for example.
Unfortunately the grocery store situation doesn't help much either. The largest company - NorgesGruppen - controls almost 40% of the grocery stores. The bulk of the remainder are owned by two others. There is very little price competition, and the selection is still very limited, although it is starting to get a bit better (I've been living here almost 7 years now).
If you live close enough to Sweden, and have your own car (or have friends who go frequently), you can save a ton of money on food and alcohol by heading across the border and doing your shopping there. Unfortunately, it's about 1.5 hour drive from Oslo, so I don't have an opportunity to go very often. It's a funny thing, Norwegian politicians tried to pass going over the border off as a "low class" act, and there's even a derogatory term "harrytur" to describe it, but it's still something that everyone does, regardless of income, simply because the price difference is so great.
- joss82 11y agoBeef is tasteless there because it's probably made out of the older milk cows. I'm sorry.
- MindTwister 11y agoThings must be bad if you go to Sweden to buy cheap alcohol... When visiting friends in Sweden they always ask us to bring beer (from Denmark).
- maelk 11y agoAnd if you live in Denmark, near the border to Germany, you pretty much only buy beer from German shops, right across the border because its way cheaper
- rconti 11y agoThe French buy groceries and alcohol from Germany as well.
- digi_owl 11y agoI recall seeing a photo of Finns either boarding or coming off the ferry between Finland and Estland with trolleys stacked with cheap alcohol (just enough per person to get under the tax quota most likely). This was over at /r/europe i think, so eventually someone quipped that the same alcohol would make its way to Sweden and Norway, with relevant markups for each hop. And i wonder if said tasty beef was restaurant served or home cooked...
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoI know a few Norwegians who have cabins just across the border in Sweden, and they will take an annual road trip to Estonia or Poland or wherever, fill up the car with super-cheap alcohol and take it back to the cabin in Sweden, and then bring the allowed (tiny) quota back to Norway every time they go to the cabin.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sireat 11y agoI've seen this myself. It is extremely common for some to take the Finland-Estonia ferry just to stock up on alcohol and not even get off the ferry.
- legulere 11y agoIn Sweden there are dealers selling illegally imported alcohol from Denmark/Germany.
- tazjin 11y agoYou can legally import alcohol into Sweden, you can't legally sell it.
- reycharles 11y agoI think it has to be for "personal use" when you're importing it. It's not for personal use if you intend to sell it, thus it's illegally imported (smuggled). At least that's how it is in Denmark.
- surfmike 11y agoNorwegians go to Sweden for alcohol, Swedes go to Denmark, Danes go to Germany, Germans go to Italy, and Italians... well, I think they just stay in Italy :)
- ce4 11y agoGerman food prices (especially; and to some extent alcoholic beverages) are amongst the cheapest in the whole EU. Germans visiting Italy for vacation are of course sourcing good wine and Grappa there.
- arnsholt 11y agoAs I understand it, NorgesGruppen (and the rest of the grocery cartel) are the largest part of the problem. They are very effective at keeping smaller actors out of the market, as evidenced by the whole Hval sjokolade thing a few months back. Of course, it doesn't help that Norwegians as a whole are incredibly stingy when it comes to spending money on food. When you measure expenditure on food as a fraction of disposable income, we're among the people in the world who spend the least, and still people complain about how expensive food is. My pet theory is cultural inertia from the 50s when spending on food was more like half of people's income. As an aside, Q isn't all that small. They're owned by the Kavli Group, which is massive.
- digi_owl 11y agoI fear that a lot of the complaints come from people traveling abroad and not taking into account exchange rates etc while shopping. There was a lovely European price comparison on gasoline done by a Russian news site a few years back. While it was sorted by pump price (putting Norway up top) they also included a calculation of liters pr average wage. If you sorted by that number, all of a sudden the list reversed.
- mellavora 11y agoI did my Ph.D. in Norway, and jokingly referred to it as "the land that food forgot." But I did see some signs of improvement, at least in Oslo.
- tyfon 11y agoOne of the things I remember best was that the stores were allowed to import butter from Belgia, and it was so much better than the one sold here. When they finally got around to produce enough locally they demanded the shops scrap what they had bought abroad at the shops cost and restock the local brand (Tine). Even to this day Tine whole milk is not whole milk, it only has 3.5% fat compared to 3.8% in natural whole milk (and which their only competitor has). Guess someone figured it was profitable.
- Dewie3 11y ago> One of the things I hate most about living in Norway Of course this ends up as the top comment. :-)
- sleepyhead 11y agoFood is more expensive in Norway because costs (wages) are higher. Your comparison to Sweden is irrelevant without taking that into account. Also please do remember all the young Swedish people who flock to Norway for work because of a much higher salary. You can also compare meat prices to Denmark, which is much lower than Norway. But then please look at some photos of how pig farming is done in Denmark. Or stats about bacterias in the meat. I do however agree with you that there are big problems with these semi-monopolies in production and that selection, creativity and quality has suffered from it. Likewise with distribution and retail.
- gahahaha 11y agoOnly 3% of Norway is farmable land. This makes it MUCH more difficult and hence expensive to make food in than for example Sweden (or the US). IF you want to produce your own food so that you won't have to starve in case of a crisis, you will have to accept higher food prices and farm subsidies.
- AreaGuy 11y agoWhat kind of crisis are you expecting that would prevent Norway from importing food from Sweden, the UK, or continental Europe, but would leave domestic food production intact?
- Terr_ 11y ago> What kind of crisis are you expecting Unexpected ones.
- Retric 11y agoNorway only has a population density of 39 people per square mile which makes a huge difference. For comparison the UK is at 650 people per square mile. So 3% of Norway ~= 50% of UK in terms of people per square mile of farm land. The real issue is food production costs are higher becasue of high labor costs, and poor weather / a relatively short growing season.
- Dewie3 11y agoThe ratio of "livable land" is also lower. Crops and humans seem to have that thing in common, not wanting to live at high altitudes or at the bottom of fjords. Though of course livestock don't mind grazing at higher altitudes, in the summer. And maybe having to have smaller farms leads to less efficiency of each "unit" of farmable land? On the other hand, Japan is pretty mountainous and still has a high population density. Norway probably didn't have that high population density 1000 years ago, either. But it was enough to cause overpopulation, and in turn motivate the events and practices of the Viking Age.
- abandonliberty 11y agoFunny, the ideal in North America is likely Norway's small farms rather than our hormone-laden factory farms. Competitive pressures are complex; neither of our markets appear ideal.