Supermarket prices continue to skyrocket – experts are sharply critical

Created: 11/25/2022, 10:04 am

By: Stella Henrich

Food prices go up and up.

And this is significantly stronger than inflation in this country.

Are Edeka, Aldi, Lidl and Co. using the situation to raise prices for consumers for no reason?

Munich – Consumers have long noticed that everything has become more expensive when shopping in supermarkets or discounters.

Whether it's milk, sausage products, oil, coffee, fish fingers or fresh fruit and vegetables: the retailers are making huge strides when it comes to prices.

As early as July,

reported on the "wave of prices" at Aldi, Lidl, Rewe, Edeka and Co. Most of the time, the prices for the respective products "only" fluctuated by a few cents, but some retailers even increased the price of some items by 30 overnight up to 70 cents.

The traders repeatedly cited the Ukraine war and the resulting increase in energy costs as the reason for the price adjustment.

Inflation in Germany is also contributing to the increase in the price of groceries in retail.

But consumer advocates are now expressing sharp criticism of retail for the first time.

A few black sheep among the supermarkets would use the general inflation for deadweight effects and raise prices for no reason.

Are grocers taking advantage of the current crisis to raise prices?

© Fabian Sommer/dpa/symbol image

Price jumps in retail: geese twice as expensive overnight

An innkeeper from Franconia gave cause for suspicion.

The man wanted to buy frozen geese for his business.

But instead of 25 euros like the day before, overnight poultry suddenly cost 50.34 euros plus VAT per goose.

Nothing would have changed in the geese, reports

.

As before, according to the label, they were slaughtered in November 2021, frozen in December 2021 and have a shelf life until 2024.

But what justifies this enormous jump in price?

, the retailer Edeka said

: "Mainly due to the rampant bird flu, the supply of geese from the regions concerned has drastically decreased." Adapted to the brand – i.e. for goods that are already on the shelf as well as for goods that will only come to the warehouse in the future.”

Food pricing is highly non-transparent and speculative

Consumer center NWR

The next sentence is worth investigating: All “relevant competitors” would have increased their prices to about the same extent.

Which could mean that traders are ratcheting up each other's prices.

A suspicion that the Hamburg consumer advocate Armin Valet has already noticed.

A sample from the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer advice center supports this assumption.

The investigation shows that there were significant price differences within the product groups in four large retail chains.

The consumer advocates state “that the pricing of food is largely non-transparent and speculative.

We therefore demand that the antitrust authorities be given more powers to check food prices and prevent possible price fixing.”

We demand that the antitrust authorities be given more powers to check food prices and prevent possible price fixing.

Consumer Center North Rhine-Westphalia

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Price jumps in retail: groceries are becoming more and more expensive

In fact, groceries in Germany are more expensive than ever.

The Munich Ifo Institute has already warned consumers that food prices will continue to rise.

And the data from Eurostat (Editor's note: EU Statistical Office) also shows that food in Germany has become more expensive a lot faster than in other Western European countries since 2021.

From the point of view of consumer advocates, politicians are therefore urgently required to relieve consumers with low incomes and recipients of social benefits, as they can no longer shoulder the increased cost of living for food and drink without support.

Because for them, the risk of poverty has increased significantly just because of the electricity bill, as an example from Erding in Bavaria shows.

The NRW consumer center urgently appeals to companies to set fair prices for consumers.