Do they mean foreign companies operating in Austria, or separate DBs/web sites for other countries? (The forks[1] don't have legible names) I'd love to see a New Zealand one, as we have a big problem right now with rising cost of living and lots of suspicion of shenanigans.
The website has a 'Mueller' and a 'Mueller DE', I assume the first one is Mueller in Austria.
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.
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...
He added foreign stores that sell the partially sell the same things. Sometimes these stores also sell Austrian products which are cheaper in those countries than they are in Austria.
Most famously, Red Bull, which is made in Austria but it's actually cheaper after it gets shipped to Germany than in the country it's made in. Insane. Austrians are being flogged. Germany feels like the only EU country with some sane competition in the retail sector.
Red Bull is not made in Austria, at least not necessarily. The European company is headquartered there, but its business model is largely just owning the IP. The filling of Red Bull cans is outsourced to Rauch, which produces at least some of the product in Switzerland.
The swiss-made Red Bull is exclusively for non-EU markets. It is a customs/cheap water/nearby headquarters thing.
A lot of Red Bull is made in Austria too.
I get the feeling that the same tricks are being played in Switzerland. Coop and Migros feel a lot like a duopoly, and discounts also cyclical. Not unusual to see 40% discount on outrageously overpriced detergents, for example.
In Switzerland such pricing tricks would be somewhat expected since it's not an EU member meaning it's isolated and less impacted by the free market pressures and competition from the union.
You are hinting towards the bigger issue here. Yes, this guy has looked through the crack in the matrix, but the fact that inflation is impacting prices all over the western world directly and elsewhere indirectly has nothing to do with pricing shenanigans of the oligopolies.
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.
No component of any culture is strange until you compare it to a different culture. Here's a funny:
An Italian millionaire visited my relatives in the Netherlands, while walking around town he went on some rant on how ridiculously fragile everything in the public space was. An example he pointed out the many concrete raised flower beds maintained by the city. Look! He said, walked up to one, started ripping out the plants and throwing them around. Look! Anyone can just do this! You can take the plants home and sell them! Who is to stop me? As if a poor movie settings, A police car drove by behind him that same moment, they stopped, walked up to him from behind, the first thing he noticed was his arms pulled behind his back, click handcuffs on. They turned him around, walked him to the car, put him in the back seat. All without exchanging a word. An hour later he was returned. It proceeded to very loudly proclaim (the way Italians do) that it was the best 75 guilders he spend on his vacation and that this was the best country he had ever visited. The next day he noticed his flower bed was restored and silently pointed at it.
[1] https://github.com/badlogic/heissepreise/forks