It didn’t take We will have to wait for Mario Zechner to prove the government wrong. In May, the independent software developer listened to a radio interview with Austrian Labor Minister Martin Kocher, who said the government would create a new database that will help people find milk, eggs and other cheapest supermarket products to combat soaring food prices. price. However, setting up the planned system would take months and would only cover a handful of food types. Zechner decided to take action.
Within two hours of hearing the interview, Zechner had built the first prototype of a comparison system, extracting the prices of 22,000 items from the websites of Austria’s two largest supermarket chains. “I decided to sit down in the afternoon and see how difficult it can be,” says Zechner. The result was Heisse Preise (which translates to “Hot Prices”), with Zechner open sourced the project on GitHub. “From then on, it kind of escalated,” he said.
A few months later, Heisse Preise has grown significantly, demonstrating the power of citizen-developed tools and what can be achieved when data is open to everyone. The comparison site now lists prices from 10 Austrian supermarket chains, as well as four neighboring chains from Germany and Slovenia. Heisse Preise includes more than 177,000 pieces. Using data provided by an anonymous contributor and local press, the items’ price history dates back to 2017. Zechner’s creation of the tool comes as food retailers and European governments clash over rising prices and the cost of living.
Perhaps more importantly, Zechner’s tool shed light on the opaque world of price changes in supermarkets, making it possible to track price rises and falls. Transparency, Zechner and others say, shows that there may be little difference in prices at some large supermarkets, and within days of an item’s price change, competitors can mirror the change.
Data collected by Heisse Preise and other recently emerging DIY comparison sites has fueled investigations by the Bundeswettbewerbsbehörde, Austria’s federal competition authority, which has been investigating the food industry since October 2022. The authority, which must present its full findings at a later date. this month, has already suggested that the government introduce new laws to force stores to publish their price data. The authority also says it “can be assumed” that supermarkets themselves crawl their competitors’ websites and use this information to set their own prices.
“This data is extremely useful for anyone interested in serious competition policies,” says Leonhard Dobusch, academic director of the Momentum Institute, a progressive Austrian think tank. “It really helps to gain insight into pricing strategies [and] pricing coordination tactics.
Rising prices
The combination of high inflation, energy prices and Russia’s war in Ukraine has led to rapidly rising food prices across Europe. Austria is no exception. The country’s food market is dominated by three main supermarkets: Spar, Billa and Hofer. In recent years, their prices have been increasing. Since February 2021, the price of eggs in Austria has increased by 21 percent, milk by 26 percent and onions by 47 percent more than before. Beer has increased by almost a third, according to a recent analysis of the country’s media.
As prices soar, politicians and economists across Europe are looking for ways to solve the problems, ordering retailers to make prices clearer, scrutinizing manufacturers’ profits, highlighting “contraction-flation » and demanding more data on competition. Austrian politicians have proposed the price transparency database as one measure among a wider range of suggestions.
