Oddbean

I'm but a lowly computer nerd and lay person, and not someone with an economics degree. I simply handed the data over in the hopes their experts would figure this shit out. Well. Today they presented their first preliminary report. In it, they basically copied my long ass email with answers to their questions from earlier more or less verbatim. They agreed with my conclusions regarding what needs to be done on the legal and technical site. https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/669/285/478/026/original/1e5d0fd84bcb928e.png

And they also officially said it's very likely the grocery chains use automated systems to follow each other in prices. No word on the other data. We'll find out what they think end of October when the full report is scheduled to be released. Now, here's how the chain of command works in this sector. The competition authority is apolitical but under the reign of the politically appointed minister of economics. They can only report and suggest to him. He then decides what gets done.

The suggestion by the competition authority to the minister was great: 1. Using the data should be made legal by the legislature for certain parties, including price comparison platforms and academic institutions. 2. Grocery chains of a certain size must publish all their data in real-time according to a predefined scheme with all necessary meta data to make things comparable and allow matching of products across stores. Fantastic! Or so I thought.

Remember the chain of command. The minister decides what actually gets done. And that minister is a member of the conservative party. You can already guess what gets done, right? His plan: 1. The grocery chains must publish data. But only for a hand-picked list of basic products. Not the entire sortiment, like we do now. 2. Platform owners can be sanctioned/sued if they display the data the wrong way. There's are only two up-sides in all of this.

First of all, the minister initially planned to create a price comparison platform "himself". This would have meant that some company he's buddy buddy with would have gotten a million Euro contract and delivered an abmysal failure of a system. He's now given up on that. The second upside: as soon as media coverage of our efforts picked up, the price hikes stopped for the most part. I'm obviously not entirely attributing this to our work. But I like to think we played a part in it.

I don't have a sound cloud, but I have another little project. https://cards-for-ukraine.at/ We have a charity where we ask for donations which we convert into €50 grocery vouchers for Ukrainian families that fled to Austria. Our state fails them as well. We are zero overhead, every cent goes towards the vouchers. We pay the rest (envelops, stamps, printer cartridges, etc.) We are 100% transparent, all contracts/orders/bills/payments here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1PxOL8A44bIRU1Hdoq87_2iXSLNmnMXQr?usp=drive_link Bunch of friends doing stuff. https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/730/154/213/764/original/186dfad105628f64.jpeg https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/733/851/911/754/original/e2b1b6848d5294d4.png https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/737/614/041/439/original/e7793ac694abd0dc.png https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/738/541/084/138/original/ab704435b5f4c640.jpeg

Yeah, the irony of sending grocery vouchers for the same grocery stores that I go up against with my platform is not lost on me. Anyways, we've been able to send out ~4500 vouchers in a bit over a year to as many families. That's about €220,000 worth of donations. ~6000 families have signed up with us, about 1500 are still waiting for a voucher. If you can spare some money, here you go: https://cards-for-ukraine.at/donate The latest batch went out today. CW link to shitbird site https://twitter.com/badlogicgames/status/1702670312981049561 https://cdn.masto.host/mastodongamedevplace/media_attachments/files/111/071/750/609/670/451/original/be40aaaaafabdb50.png

Oh, and if you want to do this for your own country, you can re-use what we build so far! https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise Happy to help if you need guidance! Adding a store is usually less than 200 LOC if they have a search API in their web store. https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise/blob/main/stores/billa.js

I commend the effort but I disagree with accusation of some sort of conspiracy or collusion beyond automated tracking of commodity prices on the European markets, which can explain the majority of the massive price hikes. There was a lot of diesel price instability in the market because of the lock downs, a massive drought over the summer that left the Rhine, Po and other important rivers running extremely low which made shunting the produce up and down Europe impossible or extremely expensive. Then you have to consider the currency inflation and the war in Ukraine kicking off. Food prices are always a leading indicator when it comes to inflation because both the farmers and grocers have to divine what the future holds.. They always overestimate what the prices should be in times of stress rather than allow themselves to go bankrupt. As for the minister screwing around getting millions for his favored NGOs that do absolutely nothing for years -- that type of featherbedding is so common that its hardly worth talking about.

Just a shitty 30 second chart, you can see the Wheat futures go absolutely apeshit the moment the Ukraine war kicks off, has a drop off when it becomes apparent that the farmers had a successful spring planting then a renewed bit of angst starts building up until September when its clear the harvests were acceptable and that begins its downward trend. https://media.salastil.com/media/93fa78dcbf4c37f3f184d1b0a15cd30d795df9ce1ca1c874c31f54585bf813bb.png