> 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
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).
Its very common for people from Salzburg/Austria to shop in the Berchtesgaden region, however with bigger distances from the border this doesn't make sense.
Re Austrian products cheaper abroad than in Austria - there was the curious case of a beer drink from Gösser, that was sold cheaper 700km away from the brewery in Berlin than in the town of the brewery itself: https://twitter.com/KernNiko/status/1692954540293947408/phot.... Gösser argued they wanted to promote the drink in Germany against local competition and that this was a temporary price drop.
Again, Germany made a smarter move by developing beer powder concentrate (https://www.wa.de/verbraucher/bierpulver-klosterbrauerei-neu... German). This allows them to remove the 90% water share of the beer when exporting it to Asia and still sell it as "brewed in Germany".
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).