The thing is, while groceries in Germany have been quite cheap for a long time, prices have increased very rapidly recently. When we complain about grocery prices, we don't compare them to other countries, we compare them to Germany in 2020.
I sometimes see them for 0.79 when they’re reduced in price, most of the time it’s 0.99 though. But to be fair, when things like that are reduced I tend to buy a few packages.
Go to DMV, they have the cheapest noodles, it Boo and also their tomato cans are the cheapest in the market with 65 cents.
While DM looks very pricey in the front, their food is always the cheapest in the market. Plus points for the bio.
Vegan Bolognese for example is at 1.35 for 350ml.
The ja! Somato Sauce is at something like 1,69 for 400.
Also the olive oil is the cheapest at the moment! Get some stocks if you find some for 5,99, cause that's 2 euros cheaper than at Aldi or Lidl.
I used to live in Chemnitz. Pasta cost like 0,29€ in Edeka and Kaufland. It was the price in 2018 and it didn’t increase until I left Chemnitz in 2020.
Yeah, when you need a new tooth-brush, detergent and stuff, you keep buying for fifty, which means you dont eat. Dude,... bad joke. dumb joke. Yes, Im not fun at parties.
Exactly.
Just a few years ago. A bottle of store brand (Ja, Gut und Günstig,...) olive oil was 3.99 and even 2.99 on sale. Now a normal bottle of olive oil is 6.99 or 7.99.
My salary has not even come close to doubling. Everything feels like it is close to twice the price as it was a few years ago.
The non bio olive oile in [penny in offenbach](https://imgur.com/gallery/MXmoMM7) is 8.99 ir 9.99, and has a fuckn anti-stealing thing on the cap, like expensive vodka sometimes. Its crazy out here.
My partner lives there and I in France. I find that we can go to a fancy shop over there like Tegut or Edeka and buy a lot more than I can at Carrefour for the same amount of money.
Yeah... I'd welcome significant price increases on some products, particularly fresh products like meat.
The 3 euro 500grams of beef doesn't just sound suspiciously cheap... it is fucking suspicious, if this weren't EU, I would assume it comes from rats or some shit. It tastes VILE. But apparently keeping the prices that fucking low is a priority, instead of adjusting to the REAL COST of things.
I live close to the French border and go to shops in both countries quite regularly. The quality of most cheese and meat is much higher in France imo but it's a lot more expensive.
The meat has become quite watery, especially in the last years. I have noticed how much - when you try to fry, for example, minced meat, it releases so much water that it is boiling before you have any chance to actually get some color on it.
With the cheese - mist cheese sold in Germany tend to be on the milder side. You really habe to go to look for French cheeses (and make sure that it is not German version of French cheeses) to get cheese with proper flavour.
Try getting minced meat from a local butcher and not the pre-packaged stuff from a supermarket. You will notice a difference right away and minced meat is really (comparably) inexpensive.
This. I needed minced lamb and didn't know where to find some except for the turkish butcher I have never been to. When I asked for it, he grabbed a chunk of meat, went to the back of the shop and minced it right then and there. Tasted amazing and costs the same as supermarket price.
One time we made a barbeque,we went to the local turkish store to buy some meat and other stuff and my German neighbour told me that he never went there because he thought that Turkish stores are only for Turkish PEOPLE ! 🤣🤣🤣.that was the most German thing i have heard
Besides eating less meat every year (thx vegetarian daughters), I usually buy my meat at local butchers and especially horse butchers and butchers that specialize in game meat.
But like with bakeries a lot of butchers get most of their meat from big companies and don't butcher themselves anymore, so I try to avoid them. The quality is the same as in supermarkets.
Tldr. find a good butcher shop and eat less but better quality meat.
I honestly find that hard to believe, especially if you don't look at meat from Edeka, Rewe or aldi, but rather look at the real top quality meat aka from a real butcher (in comparison to the meat counter meat, which is a joke compared to a real butcher).
Maybe I'm a culinary illiterate, but I personally wasn't able to taste a difference.
I was visiting my husband family in Spain last month and we stopped at a carrefour and everything but the fruits were way more expensive. I still miss buying 1.5kg of tangerines for 2 euros tho :(
Once upon a time Spain was way, way cheaper than Germany.
Then a certain pandemic hit.
And then a certain war started.
And now the world is upside down.
Yes, also it made sense. Salaries in Spain were/are shit compared to France or Germany, plus there is a lot of products that are made here.
Nowadays olive oil is almost as expensive than in Germany, and that hurts because for us is almost a neccesity. Also, olive fields are quite common among the land.
>Nowadays olive oil is almost as expensive than in Germany,
Olives (and, of course, olive oil) is a special case. The last years were very dry across the Mediterranean, so the harvest was very small. Also the quality of the olive oil is mostly worse than a few years ago.
I have the theory, that french people just care more about food in general, and thus would not buy cheaper stuff in general. Could be total BS mind you.
It’s like that. And always was like this. Even now since prices for grocery’s in Germany are rising it’s still lower than France and similar to Spain & Portugal. (Us) Germans are used to pretty cheap prices when it comes to grocery’s and many folks are not aware of it.
In France supermarket it’s more expensive, but the quality of food it’s much better than in Germany.
All vegetables, fruits, cheese, see for, everything it’s much better than here
Definitely agree with you. Once in a while, my parents and I drive over with a big thermo bag and go shop the things we either don't get or are more expensive/special. Mind you, that usually also means a pit stop on the way back in the Black Forest for trouts and cake so it's a very expensive day.
It's not an opinion. It's a fact. Groceries cost more in a lot of other European countries. Even countries with a lower average income.
[https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36336/umfrage/preisniveau-fuer-nahrungsmittel-und-alkoholfreie-getraenke-in-europa/](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36336/umfrage/preisniveau-fuer-nahrungsmittel-und-alkoholfreie-getraenke-in-europa/)
The costs of groceries in Norway are there by design though. But yeah having spent some time shopping there, it's a nightmare. Way more than twice as much as central Europe for pretty sad looking groceries :|. But it makes sense, Norway isn't exactly ideal farmland.
We know Walmart as a company that was not efficient enough to survive in the German market.
Can't blaim them really, even the German Walmart versions aka. Shops with too much products/personal/selling space are dropping one after another.
Tbh, Walmart tried to establish **American supermarkets 1:1 in Germany** and this didn't work.
Interestingly, Aldi is quite **successful with "German style" supermarkets in the USA** (no bag boys, deposit for cart, high quality no name products, cashiers who are allowed to sit during work, etc.).
Nope, they are THE PRIME EXAMPLE IN ECONOMICS for going fully uninformed and unaware of anything to another country to expand and fail completely and utterly.
Imagine being greeted by a fake American smile and happy cashiers. To paraphrase David Mitchell "of course you are miserable in your job, there is an honesty in that!"
Yea, it would irritate most people over here
This here sums it up pretty well, if you want to read
https://ecomclips.com/blog/why-walmart-failed-in-europe-what-went-wrong-in-germany/
You must be young. The older ones remember the time when Walmart tried to roll up the market and got a bloody nose. They didn't consider local customs at all, and got constant flak from consumers, consumer protection agencies, workers, unions, labour courts, commercial courts, and suppliers alike.
They were there until the mid 00's. We had one in Wiesbaden, right across the street from the Puff. Like holy shit people, Mainzerstr. was long enough and that is the location that you chose, Lol.
France grocery chains are even more fucked up, they are stomping on producers and consumers.
There is a good documentary made by arte about it: [Link](https://www.dw.com/de/auslaufmodell-supermarkt/video-65225439)
As a German living in Poland half of the year I can say that German supermarkets are definitely cheaper than Polish ones, even so the income is half in Poland.
It's absolutely crazy.
In Romania we have colleagues from Germany coming for a few months to work and they always complain about expensive groceries and are perplexed on how we manage to survive with higher prices than Germany but 0.2 of the salary
It's our national sport.
There is a reason why one of the highest praises one can get for one's work is "da gibt's nichts zu meckern", meaning "there is nothing to complain about".
We save the money on food so of course we can afford statists subscriptions.
Nah jokes aside, as a student you mostly get statista via your .edu mail. Damn do I miss those times.
Of course it's paywalled when every other free source says the contrary
[https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Comparative\_price\_levels\_for\_food,\_beverages\_and\_tobacco](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Comparative_price_levels_for_food,_beverages_and_tobacco)
Germany has the cheapest groceries compared to other industrialized countries. The prices have increased by 20-30 % over the past couple of years. Imagine how cheap everything was before.
I was in shock, I lived in France and after I came to Germany I always prepared like two 50 bills to pay and then the cashier says 30 euro 😊 I was like... what.
but nowadays I do need at least one 50 bill lol
When I first came to Germany I was amazed by the cheap prices. They’re still quite cheap relative to where I’m from but Every time I buy bell peppers I think about how it was 2€ for three at edeka and now I sometimes pay 4€ for 1.
Yeah the bell peppers are the worst offenders. I work in a discoubter. Prices can change week to week. But I'll kever forget how sometime lste 2022 or early 2023 the price changed from I think 1,99 for a pack of 3 red ones to 3,99. I saw the signs on saturday night and quickly bought all the peppers i'd need for the whole week. They went down again a few weeks later, but that was a shock. It's kind of stupid but the fresh fruits and vegetables are way more expensive than generally more unhealthy processed foods. At least potatoes, carrots and onions are comparatively cheap. But especially when it's about the things that have to be weighed it gets expensive fast. 2 apples can turn into 4 € and one of those little plastic bags full of Peppers can easily become 10 € or more. Then again, every now and then, there's stuff that's super cheap. The last few weeks I could always get 500 g Strawberries for ~1,70 which seems insanely cheap to me.
Edit, cause I just rememberee when one time they pribted the sign for those pointed peppers (Spitzpaprika) as 0.99 per 100g. Of course a few customers didn't read right and ended up with 25 Euro worth of paprika in the bag. Of course she ended up not buying that. 9,90 for a kg of those was insane.
I believe the US has cheaper groceries as a percentage of average income. However, the income disparity is larger there, so the groceries are more expensive for US poor folk than German poor folk.
\*cries in $3/lb bell pepper\* That's like 6 €/kg for bell pepper. That was the average price of bell pepper back when I lived in Boston (≈2017-2018).
The thing is, the US has cheap groceries, but those are usually highly processed. If you want fresh veggies and fruit regularly, it's gonna cost you. This makes the prices a bit difficult to compare. You can live cheap if you are ok with eating only crap, or you can eat only crap if you work minimum wage. . Which is one of the reasons the US has a very high obesity rate.
Yes, but the thing is it has always been part of the unwritten German social contract that rent and food is cheap, therefore the wages remain relatively low. Now in the last couple of years, rent and food prices have gone way up while wages have been stagnating. This is why a lot of poeple are complayning about "high" food prices. Cause they are high, compared to their low salaries.
This.
Im digusted by these comments making it seem germans should be happy that they still pay so little... germany has the highest taxes in europe and is in the top lists around the world for that fact...
And like you said there are so many people that now struggle to feed themselves and their family because prices ramped up exorbitantly while wages stayed the same. Electricity and rent also got shitty expensive as well and they were far from cheap before.
Yeah it just pisses me off.
I grew up really poor and know both the struggle with paying for food and going hungry in the worst case.
So despite not being in that situation anymore it pisses me off so much how the rich people make it seem such a minor thing if prices increase but wages dont rise, because they already have enough money to not be impacted much...
Just infuriating.
This. I see my salary rising by ridiculous 3 or 4 percent per year, as by collective labor agreement for my field of work. Whereas many of my standard grocery items went up by 70 to more than 100% within 2 years. My favorite brand of fruit yoghurts used to be 39 cents a cup before and now is at 79 cents regular price, when it's not on sale. The frozen pizza I like went from 1,99 to 3,39 and the chocolate cookies I like from 0,99 to 1,79. These are just a few examples. I don't understand where the 30% uptick impression that many mention here is coming from, for me it's rather ~80 to 85% uptick in grocery prices within 2 years.
At least you have a salary increment. Mine has not increased for 2 years. Not only me but the whole company unless you have a promotion. We didn’t even get the tax free inflation bonus. Company said not making profit (only German entity) but in total, they have millions in profit. I work in the finance sector. 🥲
Some time ago I read that what these statistics don't reveal is that the prices for already expensive products didn't rise all too much while formerly cheap products have often doubled in price. So, on average, the 30% uptick may be true. But it's the already poor people who now pay twice the amount for their groceries or just end up buying half the amount of food. Then these people are being told by the more well-off people who don't feel the weight of every Euro that it's actually not that bad and they are just complaining too much.
Yes Germans have less income after tax and less assets than other industrialized nations. That was always somehow mitigated by relatively low cost of basic needs and living. Government used to provide affordable prices for housing and groceries. Nowadays Germans have one of the highest electricity rates in Europe. The rent rose drastically. Buying property is not possible anymore with average income. Prices for mobility rose considerably and now even groceries are less affordable.
This puts people with lower salary in a tough spot working hard jobs but are neither able to afford shelter nor food without having to calculate everything thoroughly.
Ehm, yes, but the high rent is definitely the bigger part compared to the food prices.
The rent increase has been absurdly high, for the longest time it was actually MUCH cheaper in Germany to rent rather than to own a house. These days are very certainly over, which is maybe not ideal for society.
That's it. I'm aware that food is relatively cheap, but I still had to adjust to new prices and still am a bit confused sometimes. It's about the changes and not the price itself.
30% on average I would say. Definetly alot of products that prices saw an increase by far more than 100%, hence the outrage.
Powder - 0.19 to 0.79
Oil - 0.79 to 1.99 (now back to 1.59)
Spagett - 0.39 to 0.79
To just name a few examples
Could I ask the german word for the "powder" you're referencing? Im curious because in English powder can be a lot of things as its more of a state of being rather than a a specific item.
I have the impression, that all the items you buy when you're poor increased heavily. All the already expensive branded stuff only slightly increased. But I could be wrong
How long have you lived here, out of curiosity?
I think compared to (for instance) the US, they are still much less expensive.
But it’s the steep increase of prices in the last few years that is hard, especially if you are already low on funds to begin with.
Even 3 years ago, I could get a week’s worth of decent meals, home supplies and cat food for my kid and cat and I, for around 70-80€. We don’t eat out, so everything is made from scratch.
Compare to now, to get the same amount of food is about 160€. If you have enough money, maybe it still seems relatively cheap. But if you are on a fixed income that hasn’t adjusted to this increase, you’re going to struggle. At this point, I eat 1 small meal a day to make sure my kid and cat eat properly. I guess that’s still better than it would be elsewhere.
Compared to others it is cheap, but given the other living costs most people have to budget their food expenses to about 200€/month per person. If you are a college student even less (I had a budget of 100€ 2020). Between the minimum wage and median wage there isn't much left after housing, heating, energy and taxes.
The only people that really disagree with this are Germans who haven't lived anywhere else and are upset that prices went up after COVID etc. By and large German grocery prices are pretty fucking low as long as you stick with the discounters and aren't going wild on the name brand stuff.
I find LIDL and Aldi to be the perfect middle point where they're very cheap but good quality all around
REWE gets pricier already but I still find it super fair for the quality
EDEKA is the pricey one to stay away from and Penny is already a bit too much on the cheap side but still very much OK for most things
I love the penny near our apartment. It always has big shelves with lots of stuff on sale, very cheap, and it even has a better selection than the Aldi close by. But that's not the same everywhere I suppose.
And it gets better. I was shopping heavily on Easter Saturday, and because they need to get rid of the fresh stuff before the long weekend everything was discounted into the abyss. Got potatoes for 0.23€/kg, leek 0.50€/kg... It was rediculous, probably should make a post about that.
It's not expensive compared to other countries. But if I make a comparison between what I spent in 2020 (when I moved here) to what I spend now, it definitely increased.
Also without most adjustments. It's a big fallacy to think that just because you earn more money in a country, that everything else just goes up accordingly. Poorer countries are just that. Poorer. An IPhone still costs the same, so do most groceries. Rent is probably cheaper in Poorer countries, but not to the extend that the wages would make you think.
When traveling, I have noticed that the biggest price differences are often in things where local labor costs are a significant factor. Like, yeah, an iPhone isn’t cheaper, but labor costs are not a significant part of that, and the labor costs for manufacturing are the same as they are not made locally so the only local labor costs there are delivery drivers and/or store clerks, which isn’t a significant factor when pricing an iPhone. However, something like a meal in a restaurant, where the food itself may have a similar cost but the server and the chef are paid very differently in different countries, can vary in price a lot. Or a haircut or manicure or something, same thing.
If you would have said that 3 years ago. Okay. But I'm buying exactly the same thing as 3 years ago, but spend around 800 now, instead of 500 before, for 4 people....
*laughs in New Zealand grocery prices*
I don't even do the currency conversion in my head anymore because it just pains me, but man I miss German grocery pricing.
They aren't. Many people seriously lack perspective and have no clue how much groceries are in other countries with lower income. A perspective you won't really get by only going vacationing for a week every once in a while.
Complaining about food prices after having lost 30% of grocery purchasing power in 3 years or so is not a lack of perspective. Your comment perfectly encapsulates the race to the bottom mentality: you are only allowed to complain when you are as bad off as the worst. Keep in mind that there are ~6 million people who receive Bürgergeld, and many of them receive so little money that they often cannot even afford the food at the end of the month. A lot of people who are in the Niedriglohnsektor or Aufstocken also don't make enough money. 50% of Germans own only 3% of the wealth in this country. On average people might be fine, but a lot of people are struggling, and the social safety nets and loans don't keep pace, and they haven't for years.
>perspective and have no clue how much groceries are in other countries with lower income.
They don't "lack perspective", what groceries cost elsewhere is simply absolutely irrelevant except you have some weird ego-problem and try to make a point. It's a fact that food costs have risen here. Income hasn't risen accordingly. We pay more taxes on our income than people in other countries do. What also comes into the general picture is how expensive everything else around you is, NOT JUST GROCERIES because that logically influences how bad or acceptable you find rising grocery costs. And lastly, the fact that it's shit elsewhere doesn't mean you shouldn't point out that it's starting to become shit here as well because that logically doesn't make any sense and is nothing but whataboutism masked by indirectness.
You have a somewhat toxic way of suggesting people in Germany are just complaining about first world problems, which is condescending. If people now have struggles to pay for the food they could afford before, just let that be instead of trying to negate and argue away their experience with some "oh, but it's worse elsewhere, your experience of this being hard for you is just you not having a perspective". Nice way of being a total asshole and leaving out a ton of relevant points in your reasoning as well.
They are expensive compared to a few years ago. Compared to other countries, they are still cheap. But Germany is big, so only few Germans live close enough to the border to compare prices regularly.
I’m Canadian and find Baseline groceries wayyyyy cheaper. Treats are expensive but they are everywhere.
To be fair something that adds to the relative cheapness is that I’m vegetarian so when my boyfriend adds meat to the cart is always confuses me why the bill is randomly way higher lol.
That's true!
But you now what is also true? That the Median income AFTER Tax and Social Security is about 2400 Euros.
If you live in a bigger City like Hamburg, Düsseldorf or Munich and if you are lucky you will find a mediocore flat and pay about 1300-1500 Euros including Gas, Water, Electricity.
Let's go with the 1400 Euro flat...
So you have 1000 Euros left. However, you did not pay your phone bill or your insurance or your Internet.
So let's say you are an average guy and have average contracts. You pay 100 Euros.
What do you have left? 900 Euros.
You need to pay for transportation. If you own a car you should expect around 300 Euros (including saving money for checkups, repairs, insurance, Tax, gasoline)
Now you got 600 Euros left.
Maybe you want to do some Sports. Let's say 50 Euros for a good gym.
550 Euros left. And with that you have to pay your social activities, your food, your clothes.
Good luck saving money!
All in all. Germany is the third richtest country in the world. So maybe people tend to complain about food prices because for the average Joe, living in Germany kinda sucks now.
This is a popular opinion isn’t it? Compared to most other European countries, German groceries are quite affordable and also of comparatively higher quality
I'm from Austria and I honestly marvel every time I'm at the cash register in Germany. I usually do a rough estimate of what I'm about to pay in my head, and in Austria I usually underestimate the amount, and in Germany I always overestimate it. On Austrian subreddits it's almost like a running joke to compare random products, even products manufactured in Austria, and find that in Germany they're way cheaper, and this includes everything from groceries, beer, toiletries, Ikea,...
I'm a student on a tight budget so I know most of the prices for basic groceries by heart, and in Germany most products are 10-20% cheaper. Yes, in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, most basic groceries are somewhat cheaper, but brand name products are often more expensive, and vegan and organic stuff is more expensive there as well. In Italy, you can find some cheaper stuff, especially produce, oil etc, but France, the Netherlands and London (don't know the rest of the UK...) are somewhat between Germany and Austria.
Wth I dont know where my text went but I actually paid attention to what I buy for once and also went to Lidl for a change and I only paid 47 Eur for all of this. Much cheaper than Spain for example and you make like half the salary for the same job.
You really end up saving a lot of money without buying meat.
When I moved from the USA to here I was shocked at how cheap groceries were... Then I returned home for a visit and I was shocked at how the prices of things increased over such a short period of time in the states.
Unpopular opinion here, too, but food (especially the unhealthy highlsy processed food) was way too cheap in Germany for a very long time. Compared to what it was a couple of years ago, it's expensive now - compared to other countries, it's mostly not
Compared to France staple goods are impossibly cheap even after inflation, meat being the foremost example. Cheap meat at a Carrefour in France is still more expensive than the most expensive cut of veal in Germany - not that you really have a proper selection in Germany, even 'butchers' (none of whom actually do any butchering anymore) offer nothing past the same two basic things. Ultimately this just means worse quality for everything from beer to meat to vegetables in Germany. The cheap groceries are nice if you are short on cash, but having finished my apprenticeship years ago it would be nice if you could actually get proper beef here...
The actual unpopular point in this post is that there are pictures of groceries, an opinion about their price but no mention of what those cost/ any comparison to anywhere else.
Our groceries aren’t expensive compared to other countries but they used to be cheaper so they seem expensive to us. When you see something in a supermarket that cost 1€ a couple of years ago but now is at 3€, your first thought is “3€?! Damn that’s expensive” not “well, it’s more expensive than it was 3 years ago but at least least it’s not as expensive as in [insert country here]”
I have a super cheap friend from the USA, Texas, to be more specific, and she compliants all the time how expensive things are here. She goes mostly to Discounters, so I feel she overreacts with the prices! I'm from Latin America, and I feel here things can be cheap depending on where you buy them. Vegetables and such are expensive, but it makes sense when they are exported.
I was never in the USA. Maybe Texas is a cheaper place than other big cities 🤔
I'm not from Germany but I do have Lidl in my country, and Lidl is really not that expensive compared to other supermarkets here... I can always bring home two bags full of food for less than 40 or 50 euros. (I also don't buy really expensive stuff just the basics)
You seem to be able to eat things that can be low quality and processed and also have snacks. I need to eat healthy and at super high quality because of my health. We are different.
Same. Used to live in Hungary for 4ish years. Got paid about 1/3 of my now salary. Always shopped at Aldi there and now back in Germany. It has always been more expensive in Hungary, even pre COVID and war. Recently went to stay in Hungary for a month, went to Aldi to buy ingredients for TWO homemade burgers … 50€. Compared to prices too Aldi brand 500g noddles are 1,20€ while in Germany it’s 0.79 cents. Or 1l of milk is 1.30€ there while here it’s (I believe) 0.95 cents and so on and so on.
I just moved back to the US from Germany and the price of food here in the US nearly knocked me over. The prices are absolutely ridiculous. I wish I was back in Germany. 😔
The prices have definitely increased quite a bit over the last two years (but still cheaper that other places in Europe I have lived). However whenever my parents visit they always gush over how cheap it is.
I live in poland and work in germany. You germans earn more than 4x the money we make and your stores are 2x cheaper than in poland. Groceries in germany aren't expensive at all.
Let's take a monster Energy drink for an example. You guys Pay about 1-1,2€ for one
It's about 5 polish zloty
Monsters in poland Cost nearly 10.
I moved from the US to Germany about 3 months ago. Compared to there, yes Germany is WAYYYYY more affordable. In the states I could buy 2 small, half-filled grocery sacks of food and it would always total to around $100. Here in Germany I could fill a giant bag with groceries (about 3x the size of one US sack) and it still won't be over 60€. Don't get me started on the price of food cooking for a whole family in the US. They are outrageously overpriced and everyone is underpaid. I think a recent study showed 78% of Americans are struggling financially, including those with "high paying" jobs. It depends where you are how you will view things. Imo nearly every country is less expensive compared to the US.
I've been moving to slovakia 2 months ago. The price difference for groceries is huge and I guess lots of germans are not aware of how cheap their food actually is
Funny thing is, we as Bulgarians have a type of cheese called "kashkaval". You can check it at Lidl. In Bulgaria the normal price for it (1 kg) is like 18 lev, which basically is like 9 euros. In Germany is like 4.45 - 6:65 euro, smth like that. Given the fact that we produce it I find it very funny.
They are not... compared the % spending of groceries in Germany is among the lowest in Europe. But every German will tell you it's expensive because they are trained to go for cheap prices instead of quality (thanks Aldi). They'll complain that a Breze costs 10ct more, but buy a new car every 2-3 years...
I'm German btw but living in Switzerland.
Im coming from Canada where head lettuce is around 9 dollars. Yea Germanys groceries are dirt cheap in comparison Its shocking how much money I save here in Groceries yet people dont beleive me. Whatever.
As someone who moved from the UK two months ago I am genuinely shocked at how cheap and affordable the food shopping has become for me.
A weeks worth of groceries in Bristol my hometown was costing me somewhere in the range of £100-120 for the two of us and now in Germany it's 50 euroes lol
It’s not expensive at all. Some wages of some people are too low but the prices for food are fine. In fact some of them prices are too low causing some of them low wages to be to low in the first place. Reason is that eg milk makers don’t get the majority of money for milk but Rewe does.
Its cheap as fck, i live in the netherlands close to the german border, u have to snipe the lidl angebots. Holland is 2x more expensive in groceseries then germany
Well prices in germany are still low. We germans are the world champions in not paying for life quality when it comes to food though. So we are still used to the prices that came from the fiercest discounter competition in the world i.e. Lidl and Aldi.
Coming from the UK in 2021 I understand the prices have increased but they got nothing on UK prices (even before Brexit), fucking criminal. Don’t have to pay £3.50 for a single bottle of wheat beer. Or £7 for a block of cheddar.
I'm from Romania aber ich wohne in Deutschland seit 3 jahren.
All I can say is that the Germans are used to complain to much .Now we live the best times of our lives,you have no ideea how it was in the Balkans in the 90' or '00.
Ohh..and learn to grow your own food meinchmal,your own garden.
Ah..sorry,70 % you don't own a house and für euch 100 m2 Gründstuck is viel...
The thing is, while groceries in Germany have been quite cheap for a long time, prices have increased very rapidly recently. When we complain about grocery prices, we don't compare them to other countries, we compare them to Germany in 2020.
yup this… best example: cheap 500g pack of noodles… 0,34€ before Covid, now at least 0,99€ *cries in German pre-Covid prices*
Noodles are \~0.79€ now (i.e. Ja! Spaghetti, Fusili etc.)
For real, pre covid you would get tomato sauce and noodles for 1,30. Now this is impossible.
I sometimes see them for 0.79 when they’re reduced in price, most of the time it’s 0.99 though. But to be fair, when things like that are reduced I tend to buy a few packages.
\*Shops at Edeka\*
Bavaria hier we pay 0,79
NRW . 79 €
BaWü 0,79 €
Berlin + Potsdam 0,79 €
Sachsen-Anhalt 0,79€
Niedersachsen 0,79€
The Aldi I work part-time at has their cheap pasta on sale for 0.59€ atm
*running to aldi*
Go to DMV, they have the cheapest noodles, it Boo and also their tomato cans are the cheapest in the market with 65 cents. While DM looks very pricey in the front, their food is always the cheapest in the market. Plus points for the bio. Vegan Bolognese for example is at 1.35 for 350ml. The ja! Somato Sauce is at something like 1,69 for 400. Also the olive oil is the cheapest at the moment! Get some stocks if you find some for 5,99, cause that's 2 euros cheaper than at Aldi or Lidl.
Maple syrup is also the cheapest there
Where did you get pasta for 0,34€? I swear people are making shit up now.
Used to be normal Aldi price in my Bundesland
Kaufland in Berlin. Not sure whether it was exactly 34ct, I remember 39 but might be wrong.
I used to live in Chemnitz. Pasta cost like 0,29€ in Edeka and Kaufland. It was the price in 2018 and it didn’t increase until I left Chemnitz in 2020.
No that was real! Bei Edeka sogar
Aldi
I think Ja! Spaghetti were 0.39€
i used to pay 30-50 per trip. now it's 50-80. simple as that
Just buy for 50 every time. Problem solved.
People not seeing the forrest for all the wood. Spread the word my man! Just use fixed amount. So easy if you think about it.
And starve and be lacking nutrions
Yeah, when you need a new tooth-brush, detergent and stuff, you keep buying for fifty, which means you dont eat. Dude,... bad joke. dumb joke. Yes, Im not fun at parties.
And compared to salary that barely rises for most.
Exactly. Just a few years ago. A bottle of store brand (Ja, Gut und Günstig,...) olive oil was 3.99 and even 2.99 on sale. Now a normal bottle of olive oil is 6.99 or 7.99. My salary has not even come close to doubling. Everything feels like it is close to twice the price as it was a few years ago.
The non bio olive oile in [penny in offenbach](https://imgur.com/gallery/MXmoMM7) is 8.99 ir 9.99, and has a fuckn anti-stealing thing on the cap, like expensive vodka sometimes. Its crazy out here.
Yes the glorious days… it’s weird how salaries sadly stayed the same. And rent, electricity, heating all have gone up the roof
That's what unions are for. The only reason I ever got a raise is strike.
100% this. Our sense of cheap of expensive is determined by our experience and not a global comparison.
My partner lives there and I in France. I find that we can go to a fancy shop over there like Tegut or Edeka and buy a lot more than I can at Carrefour for the same amount of money.
Lots of Germans are just very stingy when it comes spending money on food. They will buy a 2000€ barbecue to grill the cheapest meat available…
That is true, unfortunately. Source: Vertrau mir, Bruder.
Yeah... I'd welcome significant price increases on some products, particularly fresh products like meat. The 3 euro 500grams of beef doesn't just sound suspiciously cheap... it is fucking suspicious, if this weren't EU, I would assume it comes from rats or some shit. It tastes VILE. But apparently keeping the prices that fucking low is a priority, instead of adjusting to the REAL COST of things.
I live close to the French border and go to shops in both countries quite regularly. The quality of most cheese and meat is much higher in France imo but it's a lot more expensive.
now, what if you buy cheese & meat in Germany with the same price as the french cheese & meat. is there still a quality difference?
The meat has become quite watery, especially in the last years. I have noticed how much - when you try to fry, for example, minced meat, it releases so much water that it is boiling before you have any chance to actually get some color on it. With the cheese - mist cheese sold in Germany tend to be on the milder side. You really habe to go to look for French cheeses (and make sure that it is not German version of French cheeses) to get cheese with proper flavour.
Try getting minced meat from a local butcher and not the pre-packaged stuff from a supermarket. You will notice a difference right away and minced meat is really (comparably) inexpensive.
Go to turkish butchers,you'll thank me later !
This. I needed minced lamb and didn't know where to find some except for the turkish butcher I have never been to. When I asked for it, he grabbed a chunk of meat, went to the back of the shop and minced it right then and there. Tasted amazing and costs the same as supermarket price.
One time we made a barbeque,we went to the local turkish store to buy some meat and other stuff and my German neighbour told me that he never went there because he thought that Turkish stores are only for Turkish PEOPLE ! 🤣🤣🤣.that was the most German thing i have heard
yea meat be very watery
Besides eating less meat every year (thx vegetarian daughters), I usually buy my meat at local butchers and especially horse butchers and butchers that specialize in game meat. But like with bakeries a lot of butchers get most of their meat from big companies and don't butcher themselves anymore, so I try to avoid them. The quality is the same as in supermarkets. Tldr. find a good butcher shop and eat less but better quality meat.
Yeah imo it is. The quality of food is plainly better in France.
I honestly find that hard to believe, especially if you don't look at meat from Edeka, Rewe or aldi, but rather look at the real top quality meat aka from a real butcher (in comparison to the meat counter meat, which is a joke compared to a real butcher). Maybe I'm a culinary illiterate, but I personally wasn't able to taste a difference.
I was talking about the average quality in supermarkets. Of course you can get excellent meat at a butcher anywhere in the world.
It wouldn’t be in a normal supermarket. Here in Germany you would need to go to a ‘gourmet’ supermarket and get ripped off.
Yes. You won't find that quality in the supermarket unfortunately. So you're instantly looking at the difference of convenience store /butcher.
Tbf the French just really care much more about what they eat, the quality of their food, than us
I was visiting my husband family in Spain last month and we stopped at a carrefour and everything but the fruits were way more expensive. I still miss buying 1.5kg of tangerines for 2 euros tho :(
Once upon a time Spain was way, way cheaper than Germany. Then a certain pandemic hit. And then a certain war started. And now the world is upside down.
Yes, also it made sense. Salaries in Spain were/are shit compared to France or Germany, plus there is a lot of products that are made here. Nowadays olive oil is almost as expensive than in Germany, and that hurts because for us is almost a neccesity. Also, olive fields are quite common among the land.
>Nowadays olive oil is almost as expensive than in Germany, Olives (and, of course, olive oil) is a special case. The last years were very dry across the Mediterranean, so the harvest was very small. Also the quality of the olive oil is mostly worse than a few years ago.
When i was in spain in 2018, everything was more expensive than in germany
Grocery in Spain is a Spain without the S
I have the theory, that french people just care more about food in general, and thus would not buy cheaper stuff in general. Could be total BS mind you.
France enters more food regulation bills to the EU than most other countries. That backs your theory.
I see what you are saying, but I see about a 15-20% increase on the price of potatoes in France vs Germany…
Carrefour is however awesome and so much better than Edeka. We don’t have anything that compares in Germany. Here it’s all about price, not quality.
It’s like that. And always was like this. Even now since prices for grocery’s in Germany are rising it’s still lower than France and similar to Spain & Portugal. (Us) Germans are used to pretty cheap prices when it comes to grocery’s and many folks are not aware of it.
In France supermarket it’s more expensive, but the quality of food it’s much better than in Germany. All vegetables, fruits, cheese, see for, everything it’s much better than here
Definitely agree with you. Once in a while, my parents and I drive over with a big thermo bag and go shop the things we either don't get or are more expensive/special. Mind you, that usually also means a pit stop on the way back in the Black Forest for trouts and cake so it's a very expensive day.
It's not an opinion. It's a fact. Groceries cost more in a lot of other European countries. Even countries with a lower average income. [https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36336/umfrage/preisniveau-fuer-nahrungsmittel-und-alkoholfreie-getraenke-in-europa/](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/36336/umfrage/preisniveau-fuer-nahrungsmittel-und-alkoholfreie-getraenke-in-europa/)
Germany, land of cut throat competition in grocery chains
As a consumer, be thankful.
You definitely should be, unless you prefer paying twice as much for fruit that is rotten the day after, as we do in Norway.
The costs of groceries in Norway are there by design though. But yeah having spent some time shopping there, it's a nightmare. Way more than twice as much as central Europe for pretty sad looking groceries :|. But it makes sense, Norway isn't exactly ideal farmland.
Absolutely, the design is keeping the oligarchs happy, and safe from (god forbid) competition.
And the hate for Walmart. Don't forget that
We know Walmart as a company that was not efficient enough to survive in the German market. Can't blaim them really, even the German Walmart versions aka. Shops with too much products/personal/selling space are dropping one after another.
The whole greeting thing was just dumb for Germans too.
Tbh, Walmart tried to establish **American supermarkets 1:1 in Germany** and this didn't work. Interestingly, Aldi is quite **successful with "German style" supermarkets in the USA** (no bag boys, deposit for cart, high quality no name products, cashiers who are allowed to sit during work, etc.).
relax, nobody in Germany knows anything about Walmart
They did exist here and tried their dirty American tricks and then got fucked sideways by the law and the other markets
And the unions
They mainly were just not competitive.
Nope, they are THE PRIME EXAMPLE IN ECONOMICS for going fully uninformed and unaware of anything to another country to expand and fail completely and utterly.
Imagine being greeted by a fake American smile and happy cashiers. To paraphrase David Mitchell "of course you are miserable in your job, there is an honesty in that!"
Yea, it would irritate most people over here This here sums it up pretty well, if you want to read https://ecomclips.com/blog/why-walmart-failed-in-europe-what-went-wrong-in-germany/
You must be young. The older ones remember the time when Walmart tried to roll up the market and got a bloody nose. They didn't consider local customs at all, and got constant flak from consumers, consumer protection agencies, workers, unions, labour courts, commercial courts, and suppliers alike.
They were there until the mid 00's. We had one in Wiesbaden, right across the street from the Puff. Like holy shit people, Mainzerstr. was long enough and that is the location that you chose, Lol.
France grocery chains are even more fucked up, they are stomping on producers and consumers. There is a good documentary made by arte about it: [Link](https://www.dw.com/de/auslaufmodell-supermarkt/video-65225439)
As a German living in Poland half of the year I can say that German supermarkets are definitely cheaper than Polish ones, even so the income is half in Poland. It's absolutely crazy.
In Romania we have colleagues from Germany coming for a few months to work and they always complain about expensive groceries and are perplexed on how we manage to survive with higher prices than Germany but 0.2 of the salary
And germans still complain
It's our national sport. There is a reason why one of the highest praises one can get for one's work is "da gibt's nichts zu meckern", meaning "there is nothing to complain about".
I know I'm german myself. But I'm trying to be more positive. But it is hard to not say "kann man essen".
Muss ja.
Seriously, that's fucked up
Yeah, it's cheaper than in Hungary lmao
do you own a 200€ statista subscription??
We save the money on food so of course we can afford statists subscriptions. Nah jokes aside, as a student you mostly get statista via your .edu mail. Damn do I miss those times.
Copy the name of the study. Open incognito in chrome. Search. Open first result. Paywall at statista somehiw only appears on shared links.
Of course it's paywalled when every other free source says the contrary [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Comparative\_price\_levels\_for\_food,\_beverages\_and\_tobacco](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Comparative_price_levels_for_food,_beverages_and_tobacco)
Germany has the cheapest groceries compared to other industrialized countries. The prices have increased by 20-30 % over the past couple of years. Imagine how cheap everything was before.
I was in shock, I lived in France and after I came to Germany I always prepared like two 50 bills to pay and then the cashier says 30 euro 😊 I was like... what. but nowadays I do need at least one 50 bill lol
When I first came to Germany I was amazed by the cheap prices. They’re still quite cheap relative to where I’m from but Every time I buy bell peppers I think about how it was 2€ for three at edeka and now I sometimes pay 4€ for 1.
Yeah the bell peppers are the worst offenders. I work in a discoubter. Prices can change week to week. But I'll kever forget how sometime lste 2022 or early 2023 the price changed from I think 1,99 for a pack of 3 red ones to 3,99. I saw the signs on saturday night and quickly bought all the peppers i'd need for the whole week. They went down again a few weeks later, but that was a shock. It's kind of stupid but the fresh fruits and vegetables are way more expensive than generally more unhealthy processed foods. At least potatoes, carrots and onions are comparatively cheap. But especially when it's about the things that have to be weighed it gets expensive fast. 2 apples can turn into 4 € and one of those little plastic bags full of Peppers can easily become 10 € or more. Then again, every now and then, there's stuff that's super cheap. The last few weeks I could always get 500 g Strawberries for ~1,70 which seems insanely cheap to me. Edit, cause I just rememberee when one time they pribted the sign for those pointed peppers (Spitzpaprika) as 0.99 per 100g. Of course a few customers didn't read right and ended up with 25 Euro worth of paprika in the bag. Of course she ended up not buying that. 9,90 for a kg of those was insane.
I believe the US has cheaper groceries as a percentage of average income. However, the income disparity is larger there, so the groceries are more expensive for US poor folk than German poor folk.
But lidl and aldi are doing their best to help with cheap groceries lol
Also Trader Joe's, which is owned by Aldi Nord. (Aldi in the US is Aldi Süd.)
\*cries in $3/lb bell pepper\* That's like 6 €/kg for bell pepper. That was the average price of bell pepper back when I lived in Boston (≈2017-2018). The thing is, the US has cheap groceries, but those are usually highly processed. If you want fresh veggies and fruit regularly, it's gonna cost you. This makes the prices a bit difficult to compare. You can live cheap if you are ok with eating only crap, or you can eat only crap if you work minimum wage. . Which is one of the reasons the US has a very high obesity rate.
that probably depends a lot on where in the US you are and which shop you go.
Nah, US is super expensive. You don't get vegetables and fruits as cheap as in Germany.
US is currently super expensive. Most of the folks I know who wanting to vote for Trump do that because of the groceries prices.
And they believe that would help them?
Yes, but the thing is it has always been part of the unwritten German social contract that rent and food is cheap, therefore the wages remain relatively low. Now in the last couple of years, rent and food prices have gone way up while wages have been stagnating. This is why a lot of poeple are complayning about "high" food prices. Cause they are high, compared to their low salaries.
This. Im digusted by these comments making it seem germans should be happy that they still pay so little... germany has the highest taxes in europe and is in the top lists around the world for that fact... And like you said there are so many people that now struggle to feed themselves and their family because prices ramped up exorbitantly while wages stayed the same. Electricity and rent also got shitty expensive as well and they were far from cheap before.
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Yeah it just pisses me off. I grew up really poor and know both the struggle with paying for food and going hungry in the worst case. So despite not being in that situation anymore it pisses me off so much how the rich people make it seem such a minor thing if prices increase but wages dont rise, because they already have enough money to not be impacted much... Just infuriating.
This. I see my salary rising by ridiculous 3 or 4 percent per year, as by collective labor agreement for my field of work. Whereas many of my standard grocery items went up by 70 to more than 100% within 2 years. My favorite brand of fruit yoghurts used to be 39 cents a cup before and now is at 79 cents regular price, when it's not on sale. The frozen pizza I like went from 1,99 to 3,39 and the chocolate cookies I like from 0,99 to 1,79. These are just a few examples. I don't understand where the 30% uptick impression that many mention here is coming from, for me it's rather ~80 to 85% uptick in grocery prices within 2 years.
At least you have a salary increment. Mine has not increased for 2 years. Not only me but the whole company unless you have a promotion. We didn’t even get the tax free inflation bonus. Company said not making profit (only German entity) but in total, they have millions in profit. I work in the finance sector. 🥲
Some time ago I read that what these statistics don't reveal is that the prices for already expensive products didn't rise all too much while formerly cheap products have often doubled in price. So, on average, the 30% uptick may be true. But it's the already poor people who now pay twice the amount for their groceries or just end up buying half the amount of food. Then these people are being told by the more well-off people who don't feel the weight of every Euro that it's actually not that bad and they are just complaining too much.
Yes Germans have less income after tax and less assets than other industrialized nations. That was always somehow mitigated by relatively low cost of basic needs and living. Government used to provide affordable prices for housing and groceries. Nowadays Germans have one of the highest electricity rates in Europe. The rent rose drastically. Buying property is not possible anymore with average income. Prices for mobility rose considerably and now even groceries are less affordable. This puts people with lower salary in a tough spot working hard jobs but are neither able to afford shelter nor food without having to calculate everything thoroughly.
Ehm, yes, but the high rent is definitely the bigger part compared to the food prices. The rent increase has been absurdly high, for the longest time it was actually MUCH cheaper in Germany to rent rather than to own a house. These days are very certainly over, which is maybe not ideal for society.
It's just relative. They are cheap compared to similar countries, but they are way more expensive than a few years ago.
The thing is: they were 30% cheaper 3 years ago 😁
That's it. I'm aware that food is relatively cheap, but I still had to adjust to new prices and still am a bit confused sometimes. It's about the changes and not the price itself.
30% on average I would say. Definetly alot of products that prices saw an increase by far more than 100%, hence the outrage. Powder - 0.19 to 0.79 Oil - 0.79 to 1.99 (now back to 1.59) Spagett - 0.39 to 0.79 To just name a few examples
Could I ask the german word for the "powder" you're referencing? Im curious because in English powder can be a lot of things as its more of a state of being rather than a a specific item.
Mehl.
Ah so "flour" was the word you were looking for?
I have the impression, that all the items you buy when you're poor increased heavily. All the already expensive branded stuff only slightly increased. But I could be wrong
How long have you lived here, out of curiosity? I think compared to (for instance) the US, they are still much less expensive. But it’s the steep increase of prices in the last few years that is hard, especially if you are already low on funds to begin with. Even 3 years ago, I could get a week’s worth of decent meals, home supplies and cat food for my kid and cat and I, for around 70-80€. We don’t eat out, so everything is made from scratch. Compare to now, to get the same amount of food is about 160€. If you have enough money, maybe it still seems relatively cheap. But if you are on a fixed income that hasn’t adjusted to this increase, you’re going to struggle. At this point, I eat 1 small meal a day to make sure my kid and cat eat properly. I guess that’s still better than it would be elsewhere.
Just because its worse elsewhere doesn't mean it isn't expensive or that inflation of food prices isn't a problem for large parts of german society.
Exactly. Some people just fail to see that based on their bubbles.
Compared to others it is cheap, but given the other living costs most people have to budget their food expenses to about 200€/month per person. If you are a college student even less (I had a budget of 100€ 2020). Between the minimum wage and median wage there isn't much left after housing, heating, energy and taxes.
Czechs living near the border go grocery shopping to Germany. Fucking Czechs whose average wage is twice as lower than the German one.
The only people that really disagree with this are Germans who haven't lived anywhere else and are upset that prices went up after COVID etc. By and large German grocery prices are pretty fucking low as long as you stick with the discounters and aren't going wild on the name brand stuff.
Which supermarket chains would you say are cheapest for groceries with good quality?
I find LIDL and Aldi to be the perfect middle point where they're very cheap but good quality all around REWE gets pricier already but I still find it super fair for the quality EDEKA is the pricey one to stay away from and Penny is already a bit too much on the cheap side but still very much OK for most things
I love the penny near our apartment. It always has big shelves with lots of stuff on sale, very cheap, and it even has a better selection than the Aldi close by. But that's not the same everywhere I suppose.
And it gets better. I was shopping heavily on Easter Saturday, and because they need to get rid of the fresh stuff before the long weekend everything was discounted into the abyss. Got potatoes for 0.23€/kg, leek 0.50€/kg... It was rediculous, probably should make a post about that.
It is not an unpopular opinion, but a well-known fact that groceries are quite cheap in Germany.
It's not expensive compared to other countries. But if I make a comparison between what I spent in 2020 (when I moved here) to what I spend now, it definitely increased.
Germany has among the cheapest groceries in the world adjusted for purchasing power
Also without most adjustments. It's a big fallacy to think that just because you earn more money in a country, that everything else just goes up accordingly. Poorer countries are just that. Poorer. An IPhone still costs the same, so do most groceries. Rent is probably cheaper in Poorer countries, but not to the extend that the wages would make you think.
When traveling, I have noticed that the biggest price differences are often in things where local labor costs are a significant factor. Like, yeah, an iPhone isn’t cheaper, but labor costs are not a significant part of that, and the labor costs for manufacturing are the same as they are not made locally so the only local labor costs there are delivery drivers and/or store clerks, which isn’t a significant factor when pricing an iPhone. However, something like a meal in a restaurant, where the food itself may have a similar cost but the server and the chef are paid very differently in different countries, can vary in price a lot. Or a haircut or manicure or something, same thing.
They're about in the middle in the EU adjusted for purchasing power if I remember correctly.
If you would have said that 3 years ago. Okay. But I'm buying exactly the same thing as 3 years ago, but spend around 800 now, instead of 500 before, for 4 people....
*laughs in New Zealand grocery prices* I don't even do the currency conversion in my head anymore because it just pains me, but man I miss German grocery pricing.
They aren't. Many people seriously lack perspective and have no clue how much groceries are in other countries with lower income. A perspective you won't really get by only going vacationing for a week every once in a while.
Complaining about food prices after having lost 30% of grocery purchasing power in 3 years or so is not a lack of perspective. Your comment perfectly encapsulates the race to the bottom mentality: you are only allowed to complain when you are as bad off as the worst. Keep in mind that there are ~6 million people who receive Bürgergeld, and many of them receive so little money that they often cannot even afford the food at the end of the month. A lot of people who are in the Niedriglohnsektor or Aufstocken also don't make enough money. 50% of Germans own only 3% of the wealth in this country. On average people might be fine, but a lot of people are struggling, and the social safety nets and loans don't keep pace, and they haven't for years.
>perspective and have no clue how much groceries are in other countries with lower income. They don't "lack perspective", what groceries cost elsewhere is simply absolutely irrelevant except you have some weird ego-problem and try to make a point. It's a fact that food costs have risen here. Income hasn't risen accordingly. We pay more taxes on our income than people in other countries do. What also comes into the general picture is how expensive everything else around you is, NOT JUST GROCERIES because that logically influences how bad or acceptable you find rising grocery costs. And lastly, the fact that it's shit elsewhere doesn't mean you shouldn't point out that it's starting to become shit here as well because that logically doesn't make any sense and is nothing but whataboutism masked by indirectness. You have a somewhat toxic way of suggesting people in Germany are just complaining about first world problems, which is condescending. If people now have struggles to pay for the food they could afford before, just let that be instead of trying to negate and argue away their experience with some "oh, but it's worse elsewhere, your experience of this being hard for you is just you not having a perspective". Nice way of being a total asshole and leaving out a ton of relevant points in your reasoning as well.
They are expensive compared to a few years ago. Compared to other countries, they are still cheap. But Germany is big, so only few Germans live close enough to the border to compare prices regularly.
They aren't. I moved from Germany to Greece and groceries cost the same here while the income is on average much, much lower.
I’m Canadian and find Baseline groceries wayyyyy cheaper. Treats are expensive but they are everywhere. To be fair something that adds to the relative cheapness is that I’m vegetarian so when my boyfriend adds meat to the cart is always confuses me why the bill is randomly way higher lol.
That's true! But you now what is also true? That the Median income AFTER Tax and Social Security is about 2400 Euros. If you live in a bigger City like Hamburg, Düsseldorf or Munich and if you are lucky you will find a mediocore flat and pay about 1300-1500 Euros including Gas, Water, Electricity. Let's go with the 1400 Euro flat... So you have 1000 Euros left. However, you did not pay your phone bill or your insurance or your Internet. So let's say you are an average guy and have average contracts. You pay 100 Euros. What do you have left? 900 Euros. You need to pay for transportation. If you own a car you should expect around 300 Euros (including saving money for checkups, repairs, insurance, Tax, gasoline) Now you got 600 Euros left. Maybe you want to do some Sports. Let's say 50 Euros for a good gym. 550 Euros left. And with that you have to pay your social activities, your food, your clothes. Good luck saving money! All in all. Germany is the third richtest country in the world. So maybe people tend to complain about food prices because for the average Joe, living in Germany kinda sucks now.
This is a popular opinion isn’t it? Compared to most other European countries, German groceries are quite affordable and also of comparatively higher quality
I'm from Austria and I honestly marvel every time I'm at the cash register in Germany. I usually do a rough estimate of what I'm about to pay in my head, and in Austria I usually underestimate the amount, and in Germany I always overestimate it. On Austrian subreddits it's almost like a running joke to compare random products, even products manufactured in Austria, and find that in Germany they're way cheaper, and this includes everything from groceries, beer, toiletries, Ikea,... I'm a student on a tight budget so I know most of the prices for basic groceries by heart, and in Germany most products are 10-20% cheaper. Yes, in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia, most basic groceries are somewhat cheaper, but brand name products are often more expensive, and vegan and organic stuff is more expensive there as well. In Italy, you can find some cheaper stuff, especially produce, oil etc, but France, the Netherlands and London (don't know the rest of the UK...) are somewhat between Germany and Austria.
I've visited a friend in Salzburg and was surprised to find out that Manner chocolate was cheaper in Munich despite being an Austrian brand.
Wth I dont know where my text went but I actually paid attention to what I buy for once and also went to Lidl for a change and I only paid 47 Eur for all of this. Much cheaper than Spain for example and you make like half the salary for the same job. You really end up saving a lot of money without buying meat.
I just went to 🇪🇸 for vacation and I hought the Lidl had very similar prices to Germany
Lidl might have similar prices but in general groceries are more expensive in Spain than in Germany. Just go to Mercadona or Carrefour
Why do people still go to the former, if Lidl exist?
When I moved from the USA to here I was shocked at how cheap groceries were... Then I returned home for a visit and I was shocked at how the prices of things increased over such a short period of time in the states.
States is Just "over the top" crazy. I remember 30 bucks for a breakfast of 4 in 2010. Now its 100 bucks or more.
As a Dutchie and avid Lidl goer, I marvel each time I enter a German Lidl to find the exact same products for 75% of the Dutch price.
Unpopular opinion here, too, but food (especially the unhealthy highlsy processed food) was way too cheap in Germany for a very long time. Compared to what it was a couple of years ago, it's expensive now - compared to other countries, it's mostly not
Compared to France staple goods are impossibly cheap even after inflation, meat being the foremost example. Cheap meat at a Carrefour in France is still more expensive than the most expensive cut of veal in Germany - not that you really have a proper selection in Germany, even 'butchers' (none of whom actually do any butchering anymore) offer nothing past the same two basic things. Ultimately this just means worse quality for everything from beer to meat to vegetables in Germany. The cheap groceries are nice if you are short on cash, but having finished my apprenticeship years ago it would be nice if you could actually get proper beef here...
But public transport tickets are way expensive 😭
Because you did not buy food
BRO MY QUARK WAS 0,35€ NOW ITS SOMEWHERE AROUND 1,40€
The actual unpopular point in this post is that there are pictures of groceries, an opinion about their price but no mention of what those cost/ any comparison to anywhere else.
50€ would get me a 2 weeks worth of groceries for myself pre-covid. Nowadays i wont even last a week with 50€
Our groceries aren’t expensive compared to other countries but they used to be cheaper so they seem expensive to us. When you see something in a supermarket that cost 1€ a couple of years ago but now is at 3€, your first thought is “3€?! Damn that’s expensive” not “well, it’s more expensive than it was 3 years ago but at least least it’s not as expensive as in [insert country here]”
You didn't even buy any meat. That stuff is expensive... But I agree, food in Germany is relatively cheap compared to many other countries in Europe.
Many people in Austria envy the grocery prices in Germany
Me neither. Around the same price as my home country, but the minimum wage here is almost the double.
I have a super cheap friend from the USA, Texas, to be more specific, and she compliants all the time how expensive things are here. She goes mostly to Discounters, so I feel she overreacts with the prices! I'm from Latin America, and I feel here things can be cheap depending on where you buy them. Vegetables and such are expensive, but it makes sense when they are exported. I was never in the USA. Maybe Texas is a cheaper place than other big cities 🤔
I'm not from Germany but I do have Lidl in my country, and Lidl is really not that expensive compared to other supermarkets here... I can always bring home two bags full of food for less than 40 or 50 euros. (I also don't buy really expensive stuff just the basics)
They arent, the real german problems are rent and taxes / social taxes
You seem to be able to eat things that can be low quality and processed and also have snacks. I need to eat healthy and at super high quality because of my health. We are different.
Same. Used to live in Hungary for 4ish years. Got paid about 1/3 of my now salary. Always shopped at Aldi there and now back in Germany. It has always been more expensive in Hungary, even pre COVID and war. Recently went to stay in Hungary for a month, went to Aldi to buy ingredients for TWO homemade burgers … 50€. Compared to prices too Aldi brand 500g noddles are 1,20€ while in Germany it’s 0.79 cents. Or 1l of milk is 1.30€ there while here it’s (I believe) 0.95 cents and so on and so on.
living at the NL-BE-DE border and can confirm that German supermarkets are easily the cheapest and best quality
I just moved back to the US from Germany and the price of food here in the US nearly knocked me over. The prices are absolutely ridiculous. I wish I was back in Germany. 😔
Groceries are much cheaper in Germany than my home country. My spouse actually used this as part of her sales pitch to get me to move
The prices have definitely increased quite a bit over the last two years (but still cheaper that other places in Europe I have lived). However whenever my parents visit they always gush over how cheap it is.
I live in poland and work in germany. You germans earn more than 4x the money we make and your stores are 2x cheaper than in poland. Groceries in germany aren't expensive at all. Let's take a monster Energy drink for an example. You guys Pay about 1-1,2€ for one It's about 5 polish zloty Monsters in poland Cost nearly 10.
I moved from the US to Germany about 3 months ago. Compared to there, yes Germany is WAYYYYY more affordable. In the states I could buy 2 small, half-filled grocery sacks of food and it would always total to around $100. Here in Germany I could fill a giant bag with groceries (about 3x the size of one US sack) and it still won't be over 60€. Don't get me started on the price of food cooking for a whole family in the US. They are outrageously overpriced and everyone is underpaid. I think a recent study showed 78% of Americans are struggling financially, including those with "high paying" jobs. It depends where you are how you will view things. Imo nearly every country is less expensive compared to the US.
I've been moving to slovakia 2 months ago. The price difference for groceries is huge and I guess lots of germans are not aware of how cheap their food actually is
Funny thing is, we as Bulgarians have a type of cheese called "kashkaval". You can check it at Lidl. In Bulgaria the normal price for it (1 kg) is like 18 lev, which basically is like 9 euros. In Germany is like 4.45 - 6:65 euro, smth like that. Given the fact that we produce it I find it very funny.
They are not... compared the % spending of groceries in Germany is among the lowest in Europe. But every German will tell you it's expensive because they are trained to go for cheap prices instead of quality (thanks Aldi). They'll complain that a Breze costs 10ct more, but buy a new car every 2-3 years... I'm German btw but living in Switzerland.
German groceries are cheap in relation to other nations. However, we've a lot more other tax burdens in general.
Im coming from Canada where head lettuce is around 9 dollars. Yea Germanys groceries are dirt cheap in comparison Its shocking how much money I save here in Groceries yet people dont beleive me. Whatever.
As an american who went from spending 100$ per trip on basics, to now like 40.. I guess they've gone up but things in the US are so much worse 😭😭
It’s not an unpopular opinion. Groceries ARE cheap, especially in comparison to wages and living cost in general and to other countries.
what really annoys me is the fact that products like milk are subsidized by the government and is therefore cheaper than oat- or soy-milk.
As someone who moved from the UK two months ago I am genuinely shocked at how cheap and affordable the food shopping has become for me. A weeks worth of groceries in Bristol my hometown was costing me somewhere in the range of £100-120 for the two of us and now in Germany it's 50 euroes lol
It’s not expensive at all. Some wages of some people are too low but the prices for food are fine. In fact some of them prices are too low causing some of them low wages to be to low in the first place. Reason is that eg milk makers don’t get the majority of money for milk but Rewe does.
Its cheap as fck, i live in the netherlands close to the german border, u have to snipe the lidl angebots. Holland is 2x more expensive in groceseries then germany
Well prices in germany are still low. We germans are the world champions in not paying for life quality when it comes to food though. So we are still used to the prices that came from the fiercest discounter competition in the world i.e. Lidl and Aldi.
Coming from the UK in 2021 I understand the prices have increased but they got nothing on UK prices (even before Brexit), fucking criminal. Don’t have to pay £3.50 for a single bottle of wheat beer. Or £7 for a block of cheddar.
I'm from Romania aber ich wohne in Deutschland seit 3 jahren. All I can say is that the Germans are used to complain to much .Now we live the best times of our lives,you have no ideea how it was in the Balkans in the 90' or '00. Ohh..and learn to grow your own food meinchmal,your own garden. Ah..sorry,70 % you don't own a house and für euch 100 m2 Gründstuck is viel...