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  huitzitziltzin
  ‘’’ Reach out to me (email “jacob” at this website) if:You can do economic analysis of pricing data, and especially the interaction/correlation of multiple streams of prices across time ‘’’The item in that quote is significantly, significantly harder than the author is giving it credit for. Canada has a competition policy agency. They are (almost surely) entitled to demand data from firms as part of an investigation. Their data will be better than the data here.You can rarely if ever prove these cases on the basis of data analysis alone. (Indeed if you could the world’s antitrust agencies would just monitor such data! And anyone engaging in collusion would attack the monitoring adversarially - not that hard to predict!)In grocery data you will be looking at thousands and thousands of prices of different goods from different suppliers with different costs who are exposed to different shocks due to variation in the costs of their inputs or god knows what else.Not to be negative bc the idea is nice, but this is a complete waste of time.~ an actual antitrust guy.
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  a13n
  Love this project. I just moved from Toronto, and compared to the US was frustrated by how every major industry in Canada was basically an oligopoly.In Canada if you look at telecoms, banks, insurance, grocers, airlines, etc – there are a few major competitors and that's about it. It's very difficult to start a competitor, often for regulatory reasons, and most smaller competitors end up getting bought out by the big guys.As a result, they have crazy shitty experiences. Telecoms are frustratingly expensive for cable and mobile services. Banks are dreadful and charge fees left and right, for basic things that are free in the US. Customer support with any of these companies is terrible.I'm not surprised that they are colluding on pricing. It's quite obvious in the telecom market at least.It seems tricky from the gov's perspective because this oligopoly/collusion behavior likely fuels higher GDP and more tax revenue... but ultimately more competition and consumer protection would make for a better country to live in.
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  3eb7988a1663
  Not sure if the author is here, but the downloadable SQLite database significantly benefits from applying compression (~75% with gzip).Also, is there a write-up of how they collected the prices? I have wanted to do a similar analysis for years, but immediately gave up realizing I would be spending 95% of my efforts scraping and entity matching. By and large manufacturers seem to go out of their way offer unique SKUs intentionally to avoid comparisons.
• xp84
  If Canada is anything like the U.S. the snag I think you'll hit in establishing answers to questions like "what does this pound of butter cost at X chain" is that supermarkets now play so many games with pricing that there isn't one answer!1. Prices may be regionally or locally varying based on, I assume, either inventory management needs or their idea of what people in one area will tolerate.2. Pricing gimmicks. At my local supermarket, a standard bag of potato chips is $6.99 or so, but during some phases of the moon it becomes "$1.99 WHEN YOU BUY 4." Other products, a lot of packaged goods, go on sale in bundles: An item that may be $4.99 will be "$1.99 WHEN YOU BUY 5" participating products which may be chosen from certain unrelated stuff, like crackers, Tide, and Pillsbury biscuits. It's up to you to scrutinize the circular, the shelves don't always enumerate the eligible products. And finally, the best one, the "with digital coupon" prices. All you have to do is get on a sluggish app in terrible cell service, get properly signed in (oh, be sure to check your email because we needed to send you a 'security code') and locate and 'clip' the coupon and then you get a sale price. If you forget to do that you'll pay full price.So in the above situations I'm concerned what kind of data integrity one would get because different consumers will pay different amounts. For instance, not everyone has room to transport 4 bags of chips home, so they may end up spending $7 for 1 instead of $8 for 4. Therefore the chips are simultaneously $2 and $7.
• 486sx33
  It’s pretty simple 1. Land area is huge in Canada, you can’t build a startup distribution network at scale and be efficient (ask target) 2. Interprovincial trade barriers 3. Everything has to have the French language printed on it - even if the closest supplier to Alberta is Montana, you can’t just import stuff without different inspection and packaging. This centralizes everything imported in Canada to things like the Toronto distribution center of which most foodstuffs only increase in cost the further across Canada from Toronto you get 4. Smaller grocery stores have tried, and the reasons above, plus the massive amounts of corporate welfare that companies like sobeys and loblaws get make the market unbalanced and unfriendly to competition.
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  motohagiography
  canada's attitude toward competition is different than that of the US though. our agricultural products (dairy, wheat, maple syrup, and to a lesser extent retail beer and alcohols) are controlled by state monopolies who set prices.the reason food is so expensive is because of fuel costs from the last few years, which were further not-helped by both an increase in federal taxes on fuel and the semi-official policy of weakening the CAD against the USD to support exports that weakens purchasing power. the effort appeals to economically illiterate constituents who support "price controls."if you want to know where canada is on its de-kulakization spiral, the state is blaming "price gougers" for its policy failures, next are hoarders, speculators and probably "international bankers," on the list of clichés.
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  adamomada
  There was a website a few years back that posted the prices of Brewers Retail (aka The Beer Store, single buyer of beer in Ontario) in a nicer, spreadsheet like format where you could sort by total price, price per mL, price per case size, etc etc (can’t recall the name of it at the moment). It was great. And transparent, and just data.And were shut down by a threat of a lawsuit. Apparently you can’t do that in Canada. They had some stupid fine print that said the data was theirs and you can’t use it.And I seem to recall similar fine print in grocery flyers.
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  delichon
  Say I set my apple prices at 0.5 standard deviations below the average prices I can find in the vicinity. Is that an attempt to undercut the market or collude with it?If I set the price to the average, is that collusion or just trying to maximize my profit on apples?If I set it higher than average, is that collusion, or me telling the market that I think I have premium apples?How do you get from correlation to collusion? This project seems to build on an assumption that it is collusive to set prices based on other market prices, or else how could it be a hammer to bash collusion? Is it required to be ignorant of market prices when you set a price so that regulators can assume that correlation is evidence of an agreement?
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  juujian
  I'm sure there is a theory of how this would reduce prices - what is it? Real estate markets became infinitely more transparent over the last couple of years, to the extent that the data is used to train data scientist. The result? Speculators entered the market at it's messed up.
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  willvarfar
  Here is an app idea:Users use a smartphone app to zap the price labels on shelves in shops.The app can provide basic price history and comparison prices etc.Furthermore, users could organise into little community groups. The app is tracking what is a good price and what is a good shelf life etc and what is in demand and what is on specific members shopping lists etc and tells the zapper how many to buy for a common stockroom.Of course the supermarkets will not like people wandering about their shop with an app, but they have a pretty ugly PR problem telling people they aren't allowed to use the app in their store etc?
• openrisk
  You will need a Project Mjölnir for that, as the real ideology, moral stance and practice of our era is that competition is for losers. Or: Those who can't collude, compete.
• scottmsul
  Suppose all the groceries raised the price of item X by exactly the same percent Y on the same day. At first glance this would look like perfect collusion in the data. But how do you know it wasn't just the supplier price going up by Y percent?
• kinnth
  This would be useful in all retail sectors. Things like DIY tools or raw materials along with components or chemicals. Most components or parts such as Graphics Cards already have strong price competition as you can buy it and get it shipped from anywhere.It is usually the local, raw materials where collusion is strongest.
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  islewis
  Big fan of any data aggregation projects like this, especially with such a relatable theme.However it feel like the conclusion might be jumping the gun a bit. Instead of "Think there is collusion" -> finding the data top support the claim, maybe run the numbers first and see what they say? I think coming up with a strong position (Canadian stores are colluding) before looking at the data makes it enticing to find numbers that back up the claim, whether or not they are taken out of context.
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  kwar13
  Never forget that these !@#$* price fixed bread for years, and got away by offering a $25 gift card. No one went to jail.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_CanadaAnd that's just what could be proven in court.
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  sys32768
  I live 70 miles from the Canada border where we whine about Canadians crowding our Costco.I roughly counted their plates in one section of the parking lot and about every fifth plate was from Alberta.Edit: I have also witnessed Canadians in awe at how inexpensive was the stack of chewing tobacco they purchased.
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  magicalhippo
  Top three grocery companies in Norway, which have almost the entire grocery market here between them, just got fined[1] for price collusion.They'd signal rising prices for a category by rising the price on certain products within that category, was one accusation. Extensive use of price scouts aided in this.Initially the fine was much larger, but ended up at about 450M USD total between the three.For comparison, the larger company had roughly the same amount as profit before taxes[2] in 2023.The recent heavy inflation in grocery prices has been far greater than what say the farmers got for the raw products.That said, here in Norway we have a ridiculous amount of smaller, local grocery stores, rather than fewer larger ones here and there.As I sit here, in the outskirts of Oslo, within a 15 minute walk I have 8 grocery stores, all from the top three.[1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/daglegvare-etterforskinga_-4_9-mill...[2]: https://www.dn.no/handel/resultathopp-for-norgesgruppen-tjen...
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  smeej
  Doesn't making this data available also provide it to the grocers? Is it still "collusion" if they all just start raising their prices to public benchmarks on any items where they're low? They're not "working with each other" now. They're just "analyzing the publicly available data to remain competitive."
• constantlm
  This could be useful for New Zealand too, where things are even worse and a duopoly effectively controls the whole market. Might put this on my ever-growing list of projects I want to do.
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  tomComb
  Oh man, we really need this for telecom too. And even more important than their collusion is their political corruption, so the government protects them from competition and funnels endless billions in taxpayer money to them.
• nightowl_games
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Co-operativesThey are not a private company, they run the store as a member owned cooperative. I'm a member, for instance. I have a number and get a discount and some cash back at the end of the year.If this theory of collusion is true, the coop should be cheaper then right? It's not! Loblaws is typically the cheapest.
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  zeckalpha
  Are converging prices a sign of collusion, competition, or is it an orthogonal measure? My impression is price convergence is orthogonal to the collusion-competition dimension.
• andrew_
  Was just in Canada recently and despite the favorable exchange rate, I couldn't believe how expensive groceries were compared to the states. Everything from juice to eggs to bread to meat was 1.5 - 2x the cost back home.
• acyou
  Isn't coordinated price setting across a wide range of interchangeable commodities with elastic demand curves a particularly efficient form of price discovery?What would be a better mechanism of price discovery for such a group of commodities?I have never viewed an ad match policy with suspicion. Real assets, on the other hand...Love the data collection project, suspect the foregone conclusion. If we're so convinced already, data may not change anything.
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  1970-01-01
  I read this title as "reduce collision in a Canadian grocery store" and thought this was an app for parking.
• winddude
  Interesting idea, I'm also in Canada, I briefly looked at extracting grocery store price info, don't forget that prices from the same retailer can vary greatly by geo and even locations. Also several stores, in store prices don't match online prices (costco is the obvious example, but nearly every store has in store exclusives that don't hit online advertising).
• Reason077
  > “It is an industry practice to have a price freeze from Nov. 1 to Feb. 5 for all private label and national brand grocery products, and this will be the case in all Metro outlets.”Sounds like Metro just admitted to illegal price collusion to me. If this isn’t illegal in Canada, perhaps the law is the problem?
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  tamimio
  I started with something similar a while ago but stopped as I got busy. It’s something I noticed, and I usually don’t pay much attention to grocery prices, or at least I used to. What made me pay attention was a chocolate bar I used to get for around $4. Then I didn’t buy it for a year, only to find out it’s around $7 now! I always wonder why no one speaks up about that. There are plenty of government employees who are living paycheck to paycheck, yet no one is saying a thing.
• glitchc
  Heck, I had totally forgotten that IGA and A&P used to exist.
• SG-
  i like this but it's only tracking price changes for the final sale price. there's so much movement in grocery stores when it comes to supplier and product costs that will show the whole picture.you'd have to have someone who has access to the internal systems that could also track the profit on each item and track that.
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  fallingknife
  Why on earth are people and government stooges suddenly targeting grocery stores for collusion and price gouging? If there is an industry with a lower profit margin, I'm not aware of it.
• scotty79
  Publishing catalogue of prices of the products you sell should be mandatory condition to be able to do any selling.
• lushdogg
  Email sent.
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  coding123
  It's not the grocery stores creating this environment, it's their suppliers that have been consolidating non stop for 10 years.This is the real story:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/...
• hodder
  "Project Hammer aims to drive more competition and reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector."In order to assess collusion among Canadian Grocers it is important to understand what gross margins have done, as input costs have run up materially as well. Canadian grocer margins have expanded materially, but nowhere near total food inflation costs. While groceries remain a competitive business in many countries, concentration in Canada has led to a material expansion of gross margins since the early 2010s from the low 20s to the low 30s:https://ycharts.com/companies/LBLCF/gross_profit_margin.This is a massive increase in gross margins no doubt, and reflects the concentration of market power in Canada, but it is also important to understand that the total food price increase is driven primarily by food itself increasing in price (COGS for grocers) and general CPI in Canada. Meaning Loblaws is driving a bigger wedge to themselves, as are other grocers, but the bigger problem is general dollar devaluation and food input costs to grocers. It is important to look at both aspects of this problem. Right now if you magically waived a wand to reduce prices by 10%, while cost of goods sold remained flat, it would basically wipe out 15 years of gross margin incease to grocers, but would barely benefit families struggling to feed themself (an extra 10 bucks per 100 spent). So yes grocers are a problem, but they arent the problem that politicians (NDP and Liberals especially) scape goat them to be. Federal fiscal and monetary policy is MUCH more likely to be the main culprit to food price increases, and most politicians should be looking in the mirror as opposed to simply blaming grocers (who are also to blame, but lets use pareto's principle here).Date Value June 30, 2024 33.13% March 31, 2024 32.80% December 31, 2023 32.16% September 30, 2023 31.38% June 30, 2023 32.22% March 31, 2023 32.37% December 31, 2022 31.56% September 30, 2022 31.48% June 30, 2022 32.34% March 31, 2022 32.03% December 31, 2021 31.76% September 30, 2021 31.30% June 30, 2021 31.71% March 31, 2021 31.15% December 31, 2020 30.17% September 30, 2020 29.92% March 31, 2020 30.86% December 31, 2019 30.91% September 30, 2019 30.37% June 30, 2019 31.00% March 31, 2019 30.70% December 31, 2018 30.75% September 30, 2018 29.94% June 30, 2018 30.77% March 31, 2018 30.26% Date Value December 31, 2017 29.82% September 30, 2017 29.02% June 30, 2017 29.22% March 31, 2017 29.45% December 31, 2016 28.81% September 30, 2016 27.91% June 30, 2016 28.24% March 31, 2016 28.77% December 31, 2015 27.92% September 30, 2015 27.05% June 30, 2015 27.67% March 31, 2015 28.14% December 31, 2014 27.63% September 30, 2014 26.27% June 30, 2014 19.75% March 31, 2014 24.51% December 31, 2013 23.91% September 30, 2013 23.15% June 30, 2013 23.64% March 31, 2013 23.99% December 31, 2012 23.23% September 30, 2012 23.29% June 30, 2012 23.63% March 31, 2012 23.83% December 31, 2011 23.18%
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  99_00
  1. Online prices are not the same as in store prices2. No one, other than random people in messages forums, is alleging collusion or price fixing. No one at any university, not the government, not the media.3. The government’s investigation, which many of the conspiracy theorists site as evidence, shows a lack of competition led to 1 or 2 % increase in price over 12 years, and the vast majority of the price increases was due to things like war in Ukraine, Covid restrictions, fuel prices due to energy crisis.
• peepeepoopoo83
  [flagged]
• 4thgenrustcoder
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  chaostheory
  Isn’t the root of the problem Canadian protectionism? By law, it’s near impossible to have new (foreign) competitors in the Canadian market. Same for industries like telecom.