French platform combines carpooling with cross-border price arbitrage in the EU

11 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by valkrieco

4 Comments

AndreasHae

9 hours ago

Cross-border price differences have been a major point of public debate in Austria recently. Particularly supermarket prices are often up to 50% more expensive for the same item than in neighboring countries, even if the product has been produced in Austria by an Austrian company.

This shows that the EU still has a long way to sufficiently integrate its markets, despite free movement of goods having been established ages ago. Projects like this may help facilitate the transition to a more unified market.

FirmwareBurner

9 hours ago

>This shows that the EU still has a long way to sufficiently integrate its markets

Austria's high groceries price problem isn't due to a fault of EU market integration, it's due to the cartels that own the retail sector in Austria and milk consumers for all they're worth.

In other words it's a domestic self inflicted problem, that Austria can solve but chooses not to, not an EU problem.

zote

8 hours ago

I remember reading about this here years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37532973

FirmwareBurner

8 hours ago

Only once? This is a discussion topics in Austria every other week. It was bound to make it to HN at least a few times since tech savvy people made platforms to track the data.

The only problem is even with the data in plain sight, government regulators still don't do anything.