The reasons IMO are: * less price sensitivity: German people are extremely price sensitive, they discuss and compare prices all the time. In Austria people care way less about this on average. Supermarkets take advantage * higher logistics costs: population density in Austria is less than in Germany. Furthermore, many supermarkets are located in areas hard to reach like mountain areas. Higher logistic costs translate to higher prices * VAT is slightly higher in Austria * unqualified labor that works in supermarkets and logistics makes slightly more money in Austria than in Germany * there indeed is a higher supermarket tensity in Austria than in Germany. Supermarkets of the same company appear more appealing in Austria than in Germany: nicer presentation of food, cleaner, way less people in the line waiting. All this makes them more expensive
For all these reasons mentioned above prices are higher. I argue it's mostly related to consumer choices. If they would care so much about prices and so little about esthetics as in Germany then prices would come down. If people would start to walk the extra mile for the cheaper supermarket prices would come down.
Germany is a car country: most ways to work, gym, etc in the average German city are done by car. Makes it easy to drive the extra mile to the cheapest supermarket.
Austria is much better for using public transport or the bike. In this case you won't make the extra way to stop at the cheapest grocery. And in the areas in Austria where people use cars population density is so low that not a lot of competition between supermarkets exists
Germany has 627 per 1000 capita.
Austria has 572 per 1000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
And here's distance traveled by car in each country, again, basically identical:
https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-secto...
Part is VAT, which is higher in the Netherlands, but I'm confident most is due to the fact Dutch people will simply pay more than Germans.
It's very intuitive, but the actual impact is eye opening. I've found that for almost all products and services, the size of the US results in far more companies offering said product/service, which results in a lot more competition and better prices.
You see it not just across consumer items, but things like financial services.
It's silly. If you can afford not having to worry only about the price, congratulate yourself and enjoy it.
Even funnier was the fact that they now have Christmas products on the shelves, "Wintertraum Lebkuchen". Then again, I read a Reddit post some months ago which explained why they're doing this (might as well put it there instead of into storage).
[0] https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/p.dr-oetker-kirschgruetze-oder-s...
But when labor gets too expensive pushing wages up, then it's no longer the free market, but it's a "labor shortage" catastrophe all over the media and we have to shed tears about the poor business owners wo can't afford a second Porsche, so immigration gets turbocharged until wages come down to their desired levels that businesses can agree is "fair".
The land owners take all the extra work and laugh all the way to the bank.
Of course if people collectively decided to work half as hard there would be less money for housing and then prices would come down. Workers wouldn’t lose out.
In the US, all the retailers earn razor thin profit margins (except Home Depot/Lowes), indicating if prices were lower, the businesses would fail, or at best become charities.
Edit: for the one Austrian retailer I could find numbers for, they are not pretty. Not sure how the retailer can lower prices without going out of business if they already have sub 1% profit margins.
One problem of the Austrian grocery store market is that there's just way too many branches per capita (compared to the otherwise pretty similar market of Germany again), which brings down margins.
A big contribution to this is the government's policy of heavily subsidizing various costs: Energy, rent, even groceries were subsidized via various vouchers and payments for a while, and now there's even discussions of "capping interest rates" – of course inflation won't go down if the purchasing power remains inflated!
Note that I'm not concluding that this is necessarily a bad development: It might just be an effective way of redistribution – but only time will tell, and personally I'm glad to not be part of the experiment.
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.
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
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.
My point is: we need a Europe-wide price comparison if the situation should change.
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.
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.
The same is said about Germany, so that can't be the reason.
I feel that Canada has a similar problem.
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?
Germany has the luck of being a big country with scale effects and healthy grocery store competition.
Great article, I hope this gains more traction and or legal ramifications for the grocers.
Say a supermarket has a $1.10 item and they want to increase that product to $1.50. They'll up the price to $1.50 immediately, and add a "40c off" to the ticket. The consumer sees "promotion" and assumes it's a discount, when it's actually just the same price as usual.
Then ~2 weeks later(depends on average buying frequency) the promotion sticker comes off and the product is now at the higher price.
Every time you see a promotion ticket, you can cynically assume it's a price increase.
As long as the price doesn't go back to $1.10 after the promotion is over, I don't see anything wrong with that.
Noticed it happening at the time, and kept an eye on it.
And I detest that decent ice cream only comes in ridiculously-shaped thick plastic that’s only good for chucking in the Gelbe Sack, not in waxed paperboard or at least a sensible container to reuse for other things.
Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets, so I can imagine they would fight and lobby politicians vigorously.
[0] https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget#food
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2020/november/average-s...
But I think it should apply to all larger retailers.
OT I would take it much further: I want government to process all transactions and do VAT automatically. You upload the price of your jar of peanut butter, you upload my order of 10 jars, I pay though the government portal, the amount after taxes is deposited into the store's bank account.
Then we could do lame things like ration peoples liquor, the amount of weed they buy, increase the price of your 15th quarter pounder this week but also prevent people from buying all the toilet paper in all the stores. (why have such a convenient mechanism for foreign agents to turn a country into chaos?)
Besides getting rid of the slow, complicated, bureaucratic, expensive administrative burden of taxation and the fines that come with it it would enable very lame things many would oppose and they would be right to do so. That is, until rationing is needed for some reason. Then you have a robust system in place to do it.
I mean, I can easily buy all of the canned food from my local stores. Why would I leave any for you? I'm sure people would prefer it that way. When a real crisis arrives you'd really want to be spending your time on preventable side effects.
Yes, yes, you can offer a terrible service, stifle competition, ripoff customers and not make any money - all at the same time! Such is life in the local maximum.
I'm not sure this would be true, at least in the United States.
WalMart used to have a tool where you could scan your receipt in their app, they'd compare prices to competitors and if they found a lower price, you'd get a rebate.
It wasn't that popular or successful.
Can't find much info online, but here's an old discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/2x9ajh/walmart_app_...
As stated other places in the thread, most grocery stores are super low margin overall. Especially on basic food items. Things like canned goods, basic cuts of meat, eggs, milk and the like were often sold at cost or even at a loss. Things that we actually had good margins on were mostly products where we had vertical integrations or special contracts with farms or factories - we were matching our competitors' prices, but at a better margin because we'd worked out how to pay less for the raw goods.
With all that in mind, I highly doubt how "disastrous" it would be to have a public price database. Sure, you could probably shave your pennies by spreading your shopping over 4-5 different stores because they're each slightly cheaper than each other, but you'd almost assuredly spend more in time and transportation costs to do that than you'd save.
What would cause the stores to lobby against it is that many stores, especially now, change prices on things pretty often. The CSV you imagine publishing to a government site is something that, as I recall, takes something like 5 hours to generate every night due to the vast variety of products across the company, and the fact that different stores in different areas may be pricing products differently or offering different coupons, or simply not stock the product at all. There is no one price per barcode universally across the company, so the outputted pricing list ends up being gigabytes of data.
The only parts of the countries doing well are Budapest and Vienna that are both controlled by opposition parties.
The reason for this is technical incompetence and cowardice of the government. They could not have done something better even if they wanted and they fear the voters far too much to let some hurt go through the system.
I am no rich antigovernment libertarian but there can be no surprise that all those measures
https://www.klimabonus.gv.at/en/
https://land-noe.at/noe/blau-gelber-Strompreisrabatt.html
https://www.bmk.gv.at/themen/energie/energieversorgung/strom...
https://www.arbeiterkammer.at/antiteuerungspaket ....
have some effect on inflation.
But how does this concretely affect supermarkets? They presumably didn't raise wages, they didn't have to pay more for their wares(at least not at the level they raised their prices at, after all they have probably long-term contracts at generous oligopoly conditions) and their electricity bill is maybe at most 10% of their cost. This is purely extortion.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/225698/monthly-inflation...
Is it because corporations are being used to put the squeeze on the Austrian people? Sanctions?
Because nobody wants to do trade with Austria?
In which case, there must surely be examples? I'd love to know a few.
[0]: https://oesterreich.orf.at/stories/3194035/
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungary-agrees-optio...
All the supermarkets have full inventory databases, they could send you an updated price list of every product every five minutes at basically no cost. This smacks of a legislature don't/won't seek advice from experts. It's a start I suppose.
Not entirely sure what you mean here, but we do have per gram pricing requirements (expressed in £/KG).
EDIT: oh you mean that shrinkflation is so bad that £/gram will make more sense. Hah yeah
The trouble is that grocers have figured out that if you fool the population in to using a 'loyalty' card, you can make everything a 'promotional price' and avoid the per-unit labelling requirements. They just show the £/KG price of the higher price. So now consumers can't easily compare. [0]
All of this can be avoided by just shopping at e.g. Aldi and Lidl, but I would not be surprised if even they succumb to the temptation of a loyalty-card-only pricing very soon. (Though they too have partaken in shrinkflation)
[0] An example https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/296117381 . "£3.00 / £10.71/kg", but clubcard price is £2.00
That is illegal in the Netherlands: You must advertise with the normal price. You can display the "promotional price" but it cannot be your main price. What they usually try is adding a "25% off with card" option next to it or with a second price card. You however CAN NOT be denied the discount in any way even if you do not subscribe! This is less easy to do online but offline the shop will have to give you the discount. There is one exception: b2b.
I complained about this when a liquor chain (gall & gall) started using their "card holder" prices as the regular prices on the cards and displayed the regular ones almost invisible (black text on blue background ...). They refused to provide the discount price to non card holders. Complained to the regulatory institution and got back to me that they were already looking into it. No fine was charged but the practice stopped after a few weeks.
edit: on a more HN note; if you use the apps for the discount of the stores they usually have an agree notice which includes, among other things, you can be tracked in the shop with the app. Never be logged in to those while in the shop (or ever).
I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.
That's also a powerful tool for wage suppression and it's been used for decades to constantly low-ball workers.
Thank god in the last decade we saw a lot more transparency online through user provided open source salary data, which helps even out this asymmetry a bit and have workers demand their market value and hope to not get massively low-balled like before.
>I think that’s a great term in explaining how “the free market” doesn’t work.
It only works for those who set the prices as they can collude on price/wage fixing whereas workers and consumers can't organize in similar fashions.
Of course ideally you would properly evaluate how much the item is worth, in utility, quality, longevity, social status, resale value, ethical production, etc. But that's difficult (often on purpose). The seller knows what the item is worth, you have to guess, or just use price as a weak proxy.
So in a sense, people preferring discounted items is an effect of asymmetric information
I don't know much about economics but I know, or think I know, that much.)
Consumers in Austria who travel abroad/to Germany often, already knew they were getting scammed for a long time now, but couldn't prove it and now they can, so the more important question is what will come out of it, as the data shows the big retailers clearly cooperating on price fixing.
My guess, nothing, as the government regulators who are supposed to watch over this, will find nothing wrong, as they're already bought and paid for to go work as lobbyists or "consultants" for these retailers once their stint in politics is over.
Why do I think this? Well, about 6 years ago, the 3 big telecom operators in Austria raised the prices together at the exact same time, and the government body in charge of overseeing these things said they have no proof that the 3 operators colluded together for price fixing and it could just be a coincidence, case closed.
The country is so corrupt, it's rotten to the core. As a consumer and taxpayer you are being legally fleeced form every direction with the blessing of the government, but this is probably true in many other countries.
The data does not clearly show that at all. It shows the expected result of inflation in a competitive market.
When Company A decides that it's time to raise prices on Product B due to inflation (maybe their wholesale price went up), Company C, being under the same market pressures to raise prices, also raises their price but, because they still want to be competitive, they don't raise them beyond Company A. Reacting to the market isn't collusion, anti-competitive or anti-consumer. If you just reverse the direction the prices are going, it seems a lot less sinister and it's still the exact same inputs/outputs.
The whole thread is made of points like that, especially the "asymmetrical information warfare" bit. He's scraping the websites for this data, right? Obviously that information is available at home. Moreover, the situation has actually dramatically improved because of the internet. You can now put together a cart on two different websites and go to the cheaper store if you'd like. Try doing that twenty years ago. I used to have to read the weekly ad to know these things, now I can just look online.
The _only_ point that's being made is that Austrian prices are a bit higher than other nations and, for some reason, he thinks it's because the companies are conspiring in some way and not that it's, for some reason, more expensive for those companies to operate in Austria. That seems like the obvious solution to me since they appear to have a competitive market with a few major players.
I would love a citation for that.
How was it not blatantly obvious that something is off if the exact same product from an Austrian manufacturer (not owned an international conglomerate) is consistently 20-30% cheaper in a grocery store in Berlin than it is in Vienna, minutes away from the factory where it's produced?
I'm honestly surprised that it took the recent inflation for people in Austria to get wise to the fact that they've been overpaying on groceries for at least a decade.
Especially in the western federal states bordering Germany I would have expected people to regularly go grocery shopping across the border (although supermarket prices aren't uniform within Germany; I have no anecdata about Bavaria, for example).
Well they could prove it (ie take the receipt with you), but got lame excuses for why is's cheaper in Germany.
Browsing around, the prices look very reasonable and inexpensive to me.
For example, 500 g bag of peanuts is 4.59 euros, the price has fluctuated between 3.39 to 5.59 euros over the years.
Peanuts name is “Kelly's Erdnüsse geröstet & gesalzen”
Edit: if the comparison is dry salted peanuts, then Walmart sells Planters brand for ~$3.50 per 500 grams.
I remember that show.
This practice, although prevalent, is not legal in EU [1]
The app would let you track prices for products in individual stores by scanning their EANs. You could see price development and website could show stores that use unfair pricing.
Seems doable to me but I may be missing some technical challenges that would come with implementing this approach.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/unfair-treat...
You can send that number to API for receipt verification - and it returns all line items and prices.
If we could get people to scan the receipts (expense tracking for example) we would have massive amount of crowdsourced data.
Wish I had time to pursue this idea!
Of course the retailers will never do this.
As Mario writes, the essential thing with this whole topic is:
> If I were trying to describe it in more flowerly terms: It's asymmetric information war fare. [1]
The way for companies to increase their margins is: remove price transparency so people effectively cannot compare anymore.
It's the same concept everywhere: the higher the complexity of the system, the harder it will be for the individual to optimize for their own benefit. Big entities on the other hand, such as big companies CAN deal with complexity and still optimize for their benefit.
Take away message: people should always be cautious of additional complexity creeping into systems. It usually benefits the big actors, at the expense to the individual.
[1] https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071588108514123
Also note that it'll also make a even bigger tracking mechanism than having a centralised API in the first place.
For example the QR-code bearing receipts from Germany have a signed proof of commiting the transaction to HSM, but not the details.
Online-capable cash registers in Poland submit only hourly statistics centrally.
Another feature that comes to my mind is setting up watches for products you are interested in. Especially for people who need to watch every expense, this could come very handy.
Yes, time..
In these days that all grocers are going e-store, its only a matter of time
Isn’t living in Vienna much cheaper than living in big cities in Germany like Berlin and Munich?
So overall it’s still a better deal to live in Vienna than in Munich.
There are cheaper places in Germany (NRW for example) where you can pay rent close or even less than Vienna while still benefiting from much cheaper products and let's not forget, the higher wages (there's no big tech nor big SW companies in Austria so tech wages are depressing).
So you're still better off in Germany, if wage/Col is your priority and not the history/culture/vibe and other such non-easily quantifiable things.
> Then we also got German and Slovenian stores.
I've looked into doing something similar for Colesworths in AUS but they make scraping their websites very hard on purpose [1]. OP was lucky that they got the anonymous since-2017 price dump! I can't find anything similar for ANZ.
Pricehipster has some histories going back to 2021 for Coles alone: https://pricehipster.com/?stores=BkG5opaa
Interestingly, the cheap toast at Coles almost doubled in price since 2021. That fits with my general observations here: the general cheap staples got way more expensive, the expensive stuff stayed similar. https://pricehipster.com/product/Gwzex_LRGY2ueMAelqR-xg~BkG5...
[1] see https://pricehipster.com/woolworths-hostile for example
These are issues that not even perfectly regulated and perfectly competitive markets could change, if that were even possible. These are systemic monetary, political, governmental issues.
I hate to break it to people, we are currently only in a lull where some may feel localized price increase pressure relief, but that is just a temporary condition.
The things that have been done, especially over the last several years, cannot be done without suffering the inevitable consequences, regardless of how much one did not consider them or wants to believe that they are starting to grip.
Unfortunately for people this is only the beginning of this roller coaster; and most here and in the subject mastodon thread are part of a social strata that is only affected in limited degrees. There are people who worked all their lives with a promise of a pension, only to find out that they get half of what some “refugee” and “immigrant” gets that hates them and is violating their indigenous society and culture. They have something like $/€1500/month and see their cost of living going up a compounded ~30% over five years while the government/pension masters keep promising an eventual 2% pension/retirement/social security increase.
I get 5kg instead of 10kg for the same price. Same month, last year.
British loose potatoes are 70p per kg from Sainsburys. I'm sure you could get them cheaper elsewhere.
Here in Germany the absolute cheapest is like 1.40 euro per kg, much more common 2.50 (!!)
The wage is a little higher so I have adjusted somewhat, also the quality is arguably slightly better, but still...
There are only two things that are significantly cheaper in Germany than in the UK: alcohol (especially beer and wine), and tobacco
Contrary to what many people thing, Facebook, Google, and other companies do not sell your data! They are ad companies that use their private data to target ads, but they aren’t selling it to 3rd parties likely many people have been led to believe. This has created a market opening for nefarious companies to scrape these websites, compile the data, and sell it to everyone from police to governments to spammers.
I’m not saying there’s a right answer to regulation, but it’s incorrect to say that scrapers are always the good actors championing the public’s best interests.
I liked how the thread observed that competitor supermarkets were rapidly converging prices on adjustments.
And assumed this meant collusion.
Why collude when you can just hire grey-market high frequency scrapers to detect your competitors' repricing and trigger your own?
I don't want Google or Facebook to have my data either, yet they've done their best to gather everyone's with various trackers, not just data posted voluntarily to their platforms. They don't have to sell it - they are the threat too.
this does not excuse the pervasive tracking that occurs by "we collect for internal purposes only" vs "we sell to anyone". an invasion of privacy is still an invasion of privacy whether they do it for their own fetish purposes or distributing it to the public.
As compensation for luu (surely one of the best HN submitters of all time) I've put this one in the second-chance pool, which will give it a random placement on the front page:
Birth Order (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532299 - Sept 2023 (1 comment)
If anyone wants to read a long rabbit-hole description of how we handle these cases, I wrote one for some reason a couple weekends ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364619
This submission caught my eye because of its more descriptive title and the mention of scraping.
There's also a multi-pane "advanced view", similar to Tweetdeck, I'm told.
The dark mode is preferred by some but is absolute hell to read on an e-ink device. I have an outstanding issue request on that, as the theme cannot be changed if you're not logged in to a given instance.
For American readers: VAT is included in the shelf price, rather than tacked on at the register like sales taxes are in the US. Upside: fewer surprises at the register. Downside: it’s less visible.
This is a home made problem for the most part, but there is very little appetite to do something about it. Austria in many ways is drowning in very expensive regulation, has high taxation even for grocery store workers.
And everything is so cheap compared to Swedish grocery stores ..
Because wages are also much lower. I know some devs who bumped their wages considerably moving from Austria to Goteborg while also getting better QoL.
It doesn't cover every single product on shelves though, just a pre-selected set of products that's compared across all countries.
There's a myriad of datasets being collected and published by Eurostat.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/hicp/information-data [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...
Are there any examples of stores getting in trouble in the past? Did it actually solve anything ? Obviously the stores are not scared of any ramifications.
And you don't need to understand German to see that in one photo it's 1.99€ for 1L of detergent, and now 1.89€ for .8L of the same detergent.
Obviously, individual items within the store have different margins, but almost all unprepared / expiring foods will be at the lowest margins.
Winco/Aldi/Lidl are other grocery businesses where it is known the markup is extremely minimal.
I’ve actually built a scraper for Disney World holidays[1] and found some interesting hacks to get cheaper deals, for example purchasing separate hotel tickets lasting a part of the full stay. I plan to make a holiday inflation index out of this eventually.
The situation with inflation, prices, interest rates and the whole state of the European/global economy is so f**ed up that only with tools like this one we can expose what is happening in the market
Imagine how much good could be done in the world if developers could create things for the common good without fear of corporate legal retaliation.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/website/economy/food-pri...
Austria, is a zone of experimentation for large German companies like T-Mobile, REWE and friends.
Longer explanation, the bottom line is that they can do it and get away with it, why and how are just excuses and cause for infinite talk on the subject. They are allowed to get away with it, and so they will do it, basic economics.
rant/ The same applies to literally the entire world now. With the "new world order" after COVID prices for literally everything have been on the rise, with ample excuses to justify this. Then the "war" in Ukraine came along and gave the greedy in the world yet another new set of excuses to justify increased prices.
Sure, there could have been rational justification to increase costs temporarily, but long term, it feels like a global, coordinated scam.
Take energy prices in Germany and Austria for example. The energy companies were literally given the green light to scam the populace by dramatically hiking the price of fuel, and electricity.
The cost of petrol and diesel almost doubled, the price of electricity (even though MOST of it is made from rivers flowing, therefore with no significant increase in underlying cost to generate) was more than doubled in some cases and kept this way for many, many months.
So since petrol and power now costs double, we can increase all the rest to go along with it, right? Sure, let's do it!
Yeah, the politicians started yammering about how they'll tax these extra profits but the bottom line will be that all of these huge corps will get away with it, and they'll run away with tons of profits that they were never supposed to have.
Are we ever going to go down to pre-war/pre-covid costs and prices? my estimate is that it's highly unlikely and never going to happen. With minor ups and downs on the way to keep us happy and talking, pricing is only going to be trending one way, up.
Way to go our fantastic, democratically elected officials. You guys are so talented, smart and you really seem to care about your people. Give us more of this goodness please, we can't wait! We're going to elect you or your talented replacements as well next time, don't worry about it!
The world is turning into Idiocracy fast, and the speed at which its heading there is only accelerating.
/rant