Governments should mandate published prices for all goods sold in supermarkets, it would be good for competition and almost trivial for the companies to publish CSV files with barcode, price, start and end dates.
Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets, so I can imagine they would fight and lobby politicians vigorously.
Supermarkets seem like an undeserving target for this scrutiny. Profit margins for grocery stores are only 1-3%, so they're hardly engaging in price gouging. The average U.S. household spends less than 10% of its monthly budget on groceries and other food.[0] This number is half of what it was in the middle of the 20th Century, and probably lower than any time in history.[1]
Just do all retailers, for supermarkets it is easy to implement, many publish the prices already. The customer ends up paying for the implementation anyway therefore the question should be if the customer is interested enough in this "new" product. I cant imagine someone poor enough to not want to know where to shop?
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.
This is what people keep repeating about ISPs - "look, they don't make any money!"
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.
This is true but housing cost has risen significantly (in percentage of spendable income) over time so there is an offset to play with here. You cannot take those basic costs alone.
> Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets
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.
That seems like a pretty significant limitation. Bulk entity matching is an art form outside of the scope of many. To enable meaningful comparisons, as many identifiers as possible need to be included.
This seems like an odd thing to state with such certainty. I'm not sure I see how it would be good for competition either - having worked for a grocery store before, management was generally aware of competitor's prices, at least at a "we send someone to every other competitor every few weeks to check prices on major important stuff". We were very open internally that we had the prices of a few items pegged to always be cheaper than any price Walmart had for them.
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.
Is there not a EU-level research service that does this? I would be surprised if there is not something like the USDA's Economic Research Service, that has price data on virtually everything you can eat, going back 50 years.
Of course doing do would be disastrous for the supermarkets, so I can imagine they would fight and lobby politicians vigorously.