Then I looked at an aspect pretty unique to Austria: discounts.

You see, in a normal country, with a competitive grocery market, you usually have about 10%-20% of products that get discounted on average.

In Austria, that rate is 40%. It's a fantastic way to obfuscate the actual price of a product. As a customer, you'll never know what you'll pay on that day until you see the current discounts directly in the store.

The chains are very generous and will send you discount leaflets via mail.

Insight and frustrating data for me - as here in Lithuania, Red Bull is normally €1.49 (and of course discounts drop it a bit), so pricing probably resembles the Austria, rather than Germany, graph. I have a strong suspicion there is also supermarket collusion here (there are only three bigger supermarkets + Lidl), but I’ve not actually done much data analysis to confirm my theory.

Lidl definitely does the non-standard product sizes - I compared Lithuanian water bottles from there vs. normal shops where they were a tiny bit more expensive, and realised that the bottle I thought was 2L (from the normal store) was 1.8L at Lidl and the same or more expensive by volume!