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Sausages with potato salad: the egg is not included in the price index and costs extra
Photo: Raimund Müller / IMAGO
Along with goose, raclette and carp, sausages with potato salad are one of the most popular Christmas dinners in Germany.
According to the Statista Global Consumer Survey, dishes are served on Christmas Eve in around a third of German households.
But regardless of whether you prepare the potato salad with broth (as in southern Germany) or with mayonnaise (as in the north): the prices for the festive meal differ significantly from region to region.
When asked where the most German of all German Christmas dinners is cheapest, the researchers at the Institute of German Economy (IW) in Cologne paid close attention to comparability - and created a kind of Christmas meal index for a standardized variant of the sausage dish.
In order to have regionally comparable prices at all, IW researchers Jan Marten Wendt and Christoph Schröder used price data from the grocery retailer Rewe and defined a simple standard recipe consisting of potatoes, onions, mustard, mayonnaise, pickles, yogurt and sausages for four Persons.
The results of the survey are surprising.
Price differences are due to the different purchasing power
It is particularly cheap for households in Altenburger Land, Stendal and Magdeburg. Here, the shopping cart for the Christmas classic costs the lowest in Germany at EUR 5.05. In contrast, people in the Lake Constance district have to dig deepest into their pockets at 6.24 euros. The distance to the second most expensive district is clear: 5.87 euros are due in the Vulkaneifel in Rhineland-Palatinate. The price differences between the cheapest and most expensive district are almost 25 percent.
Overall, the prices in the new federal states, but also in some rural regions, are particularly low.
On the one hand, this is due to the purchasing power of customers: On average, people in the east still earn less than in the rest of the country.
“The shop rents are also lower in the new federal states than in the west.
The markets there can therefore operate profitably even with lower prices, ”explains IW economist Schröder.
"In addition, the following applies: In inner-city locations, products are often more expensive than on the outskirts."
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