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>no bargaining power

Your bargaining power is that there are a dozen other food suppliers and tens of thousands of other common food items you could sell instead. No store is going to cry and go bankrupt because they can't sell Ding Dongs. Also, there are chains of hardware stores, chains of coffee shops, chains of everything which have additional bargaining power. And if the selling price is so high then everyone is going to be eager to push as much through the pipe as possible while the getting is good.

>the brands may also not be happy

Too bad. There is no shortage of food brands. This is not North Korea we're talking about.

>why aren't the existing german chains in austria undercutting others?

Probably because to do so would mean giving up all profit. That may in fact be illegal predatory pricing--using their position in the market to squeeze out less solvent competitors.



Too bad. There is no shortage of food brands.

i think aldi is known for not selling otherwise well known brands. but from my memory hofer in austria is selling way more common brands than aldi in germany.

the discounters are known for selling brand products under a different label. i guess the brands go along with that because that way their brands higher prices elsewhere are not undercut because consumers don't recognize that it is the same product. in fact at least in the past brands dictated the retail price for their products, and discounters created house brands because of that.

that's why you don't see many otherwise well known brands in their shops. but from my memory hofer in austria is selling way more common brands under their original label than aldi in germany. (i could not find much data on this though, so this is a very subjective impression. i also haven't been shopping in germany for decades. according to wikipedia, aldi (south) has common brand products from 11 companies, whereas hofer has 10% of their 1000 products with common brands. and many of those are austrian brands. ok, i just found an article where aldi south also claims 90% own brands, but i guess in both cases that's not an exact number, so that's not very helpful)

so it seems austrians have a stronger local brand loyalty.

compare the house brands between aldi and hofer: https://www.aldi-sued.de/de/produkte/eigenmarken.html https://www.hofer.at/de/sortiment/hofer-eigenmarken.html

here you can see hofer boasting with their austrian products: https://www.hofer.at/de/ueber-hofer/qualitaet.html

why are there so many brands that are not shared by both?

i guess because austrians want products sourced in austria.

this is also true in business. austrian companies prefer to only do business with other austrian companies. when i suggested that i was looking for customers in austria i was told that having a company registered in austria was a prerequisite to be even considered.

this is probably because austrians see themselves as the underdog against germany, so they are very protective of their own and don't want to become dependent on other countries, especially not germany so they don't want german companies dominating the austrian market.


Hard to pin this on "big business" when you just said that "austrians want products sourced in austria"


it can be both.

austrians wanting products from austria doesn't automatically make everything more expensive. it only makes it more difficult to open a store that attracts locals. stores with imported products do exist but they don't have many of the products that everyone wants.


Some people claim that there's a cartel to blame But I know, it's my own damn fault


it's not a cartel but big businesses acting in their own interest. if you think you can do something about that i'll eagerly await your new shop.


so you're saying that big business should have colluded to brainwash the population into liking foreign products? they should have had better marketing? or lobbied government to force the population to buy more imported goods? How exactly is big business even one percent to blame in this scenario?




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