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Comment by jsdwarf | Hacker News Reader

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)

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

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Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation. It means that there are only a few players in that space that ultimately dominate it. Small companies could not even enter that space because the regulation does not give them any space to innovate (for instance free selection of products, other opening times).

More generally, the EU has problems with market efficiency in general. The law allowing mail-order businesses to refuse to sell across “state lines” means markets are very atomized and dominated by one or two players who, spoiler, don’t really compete aggressively on pricing.

The idea of Newegg refusing to sell to me because I don’t live in California is insane from an American perspective but that’s what the EU has to live with - mindfactory, komplett, etc will not ship across state lines. It’s a single market in name only, as far as distribution and sales. In practice the only “single market” is customs and currency, and even then there’s edge cases.

It is a very weird overall market where you have these strong consumer protections but also backed by low competitiveness in retail and distribution which leaves margins for supply chains to accommodate this.

Austria in particular is really bad here. If you send commercially packages into Austria you need to register with the recycling system, license packaging and go to a notary to declare a proxy for packaging. There is so much crazy protectionism going on that the single market is effectively no longer free.

This is similar to other countries unfortunately. And don't ask about food product labelling.

Well if they refuse you can't really force them, they might have legitimate reasons to turn clients away but I agree that this is not efficient and since you cited mindfactory I add that in Italy in the hardware business there have been many popular companies with competitive prices that were shut down by authorities for tax evasion.

>Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation.

I feel that Canada has a similar problem.

It's obviously not as conducive to business as in the US. However, one advantage I can think of is that registering a new business in Canada takes only about a day.

I should add that I don't know much about regulations in either country. I would love to start a similar opensource project for Canada. I am very curious about what we might find.

we know of the price gouging and all oligopolistic behaviour in Canada, but there is no political will to do anything. big business and government are buddies.

Smaller countries (by economy or by population) tend to have protectionist rules, otherwise they simply get absorbed by their (bigger) neighbouring countries. Historically, those protections weren't that much of an issue, but as bigger countries continue optimizing their systems at huge scale, smaller countries can't keep up (offer the same price/quality).

For example in the US, when TikTok became too popular, politicians quickly reacted to avoid having a major social network that was backed by a foreign country. Legitimately in the name of consumer protection, of course, but clearly also other interests. Funny how the US very selectively protects its consumers.

It's not great for the consumer (less competition/freedom), but ultimately it's about protecting local expertise to avoid being fully dependant on another region (obviously, sometimes this gets abused). Losing local expertise increases the brain-drain, since any skilled person will know that they won't get many good job options locally.

I live in Quebec/Canada, which has many rules in the name of consumer protection, but usually it's really about protecting local businesses without going against free trade agreements. I'm not a fan of isolationism, but winner-take-all types of scenarios, where no one can compete against foreign semi-monopolies hurt us in the long term. It's hard to find a good balance. An interesting take, in Quebec and in the EU, is seeing many laws that only apply above a certain scale.

> For example in the US, when TikTok became too popular, politicians quickly reacted to avoid having a major social network that was backed by a foreign country. Legitimately in the name of consumer protection, of course, but clearly also other interests. Funny how the US very selectively protects its consumers.

What happened to TikTok in the US?

Instead of the US three-letter agencies having everyone's location, friend groups, bio-metric info, personal photos, etc.. via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.. ByteDance was getting all the data and sharing with the CCP.

So Trump and others tried to ban it or make ByteDance sell the app to a US company.

Honestly, I was kind of okay with that. As much as I hate western governments spying on us, I hate that fascist and communist countries like China, NK, and many places in the middle east literally act to ban, imprison or 'disappear' millions of it's own people that have tried to speak again the party lines.

Maybe one day even the western countries will do this. Governments are hands down the leading cause of death in the world.

But as far as I know, nothing changed, and

> politicians quickly reacted to avoid having a major social network that was backed by a foreign country.

Politicians did not do anything to change this.

Yeah, since the ban started with one party - the other party worked to block it. Eventually it all fizzled out.

It's kind of how politics work in our country since we only have two parties.

> Austria's real problem is that it's a bad business environment with high taxes and tons of regulation.

The same is said about Germany, so that can't be the reason.

Germany has a market 10 times as large and in some ways better regulation.

sounds like Canada

We've seen some concentration over the last 30 years or so. It hasn't been about regulations, though. In actually, the remaining companies first aggressively extended their selections of products and lowered prices, only to backtrack significantly on both, as the competition was gone, with about 2 big conglomerates remaining.

> Explanation from the supermarket chains are shady at best

Do you suspect there is some other reason? Like, they can get away with it in Austria but not Germany? What’s a “non-shady” explanation in your eyes?

It is indeed true that we have a lot of supermarkets in Austria, which might make logistics more expensive. But nobody ever explained why we need so many supermarkets from just 3 chains (REWE, Spar, Hofer - everything else is neglectedable). My only explanation is that the big 3 want to squat every possible spot to keep competition out. The other argument from the chains is that they are forced to buy brand products from Austrian distributors that are more expensive than German ones due to lack of volume (think of making a wholesale contract for M&Ms with Mars Germany, not Mars Austria). Again shady argument, because they could have sued against these practices years ago.

Germany has the luck of being a big country with scale effects and healthy grocery store competition.

Related, I’m currently in Greece and the price of locally produced peaches is higher here than the price of the same Greek-produced peaches is in Romania (from where I’m from). Noticed it today and it blew my mind, not sure how the people of Greece put up with this bs (the price of gasoline is also way higher).

Do they send lower quality peaches to Romania?

I think all peaches sent far away are lower quality than nearby peaches since they need to be picked too early to account for travel time.

These Greek peaches are indeed bigger, as in, apple-big, but not sure that that “quality” can justify the price difference (they’re twice as expensive in Greece). And the smaller peaches taste better anyway, like it’s usually the case with fruits and “bigness”.

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