Hats off to Mario for sticking with the topic and not losing his mind over this infuriating madness.
Companies need adults in the room to keep them from behaving badly. This operating under the observation that they behave badly when not being watched, so a thesis to be tested more than an assertion of fact.
At a minimum they arguably behave worse when there are no consequences, hence inflation becoming air cover to raise prices when prices weren’t being raised before as there was no “good reason” for them to go up.
I love this project. “Index data” projects like this seem ripe as a category, especially with AI and Ml systems providing ready observability on changes and trends.
The question is how to get enough conclusions and salient observations that spur people to the social science outrage factor levels so that they take action.
Or perhaps we should just accept that companies will use these technologies to optimize everything against consumers and not deploy them in counterinsurgency resistance-style whitehat fashion.
Imagine the optimization possibilities where you have shared borders like you’re talking about, or where digital intelligence can be injected to optimize purchase prices among consumers for larger ticket or recurring items.
A lot of room for new and better strategies here.
HOWEVER, i will add - what do people expect when you give everyone 500 extra EUR a year via this klima bonus? how is that supposed to reduce inflation? my guess is the grocery chains are leaning into this
There's a CO2 tax on gas and other fossil fuels, part of this tax revenue is then, once a year, distributed back to taxpayers. The idea is that people who don't consume a lot of fossil fuel earn money through this scheme, while those who user above average pay more than what they get back.
Of course this is not well communicated from the gov and random cash appearing in everyone's account can accelerate the already high inflation.
But with the klima distribution it evens out. People who consume more will lose and people who consume less will win.
It isn’t for no good reason, the prices are higher for the exact same reason they are lower in Germany: the price set allows the company to make the most money.
Whether prices are high or low, the reason is always exactly the same: it makes the most money.
*Might have been some other similar milk ~addictive~ (meant to say “additive” but the original version also works) for kids.
Really curious what's special about the market here that allows companies to exploit the people like this.