Important: Hungarian supermarkets to introduce significant price adjustments

In recent months we witnessed a large drop in the volume of sales at Hungarian supermarkets, raising alarm about the future of retail. For a long time now, inflation and the worsening exchange rates have pushed prices through the roof. This trend led to customers becoming more and more price-conscious and drastically cut down on groceries and family staples. However, we now seem to have reached a turning point.

According to official data, inflation in Hungary stopped rising, and even eased by a tiny bit last month. The EUR-HUF exchange is also now at its strongest since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Global prices for energy sources, especially for oil and gas have also decreased in the past months. All of these positive economic changes enabled Hungarian supermarkets and stores to stop raising their prices. In Tesco’s case, we can even calculate with a significant price drop, 24.hu writes.

New chapter in the price war

In January and February Tesco has already lowered the prices of over 2,400 products. From the middle of May, they will add another 2,000 to the list. They claim the reasons for the cuts is a drop in expenses due to falling commodity prices and the other contributors listed above. The average decrease of prices is estimated to be at around 9.4 percent. In the case of 60 selected products, this will reach 30 percent or even higher.

“Once again, we are dropping the prices of more than 2,000 products and we are confident that we will soon be able to announce further price reductions in cooperation with our suppliers. This requires a further reduction in purchasing prices, and we, therefore, consider it important that the positive impact of the global market changes is reflected as much as possible in the prices of our suppliers.”

-said in the statement Zsolt Pálinkás, CEO of Tesco Hungary.

Digital price tags at Lidl

Another less dramatic but also important change will take place at Lidl Hungary. Due to the constant price changes and implementation of sales and discounts, the price tags had to be changed up a lot. In some cases, this led to errors, such as the recent case when Lidl falsely discounted the price of sour cream by HUF 4 (EUR 0.011). To prevent such accidents in the future, and also to save paper, the company will introduce digital price tags in its stores.

This is not entirely news, as they have announced back in April that discussions have started about the news measure. The Portuguese branch of Lidl has already implemented it and as a result, they cut down their paper consumption by 108 tonnes, saving 1,485 trees. The new price tags will be managed by a central system, meaning they will change automatically. This is a much more optimised way to adjust prices and will likely boost store efficiency in the long term.

Source: 24.hu