A Magnum Classic Ice Cream in Germany has sold for as little as €5.49 and as much as €16.98. Your Duracell CR2032 battery pack barely moved off €4.75.
What the data shows
Sivix analysed 1.9 million price records across 13 markets — Germany, Denmark, Finland, Singapore, the UAE, and eight more — covering 91,840 products from May 2025 to March 2026. For each product in each country, it measured how much prices swing relative to the average.
Fruit and vegetables came first: median swing of 9.6% across 8,090 products. Household cleaning matched it exactly. Snacks and treats were one tenth of a percentage point behind at 9.5%.
Electrical goods: 2.8%. Toys and hobbies: 2.0%.
The gap is not subtle. Milky Way Twin Packs in Denmark ranged from DKK 9.00 to DKK 29.00 across 15 price submissions. Meray Sunflower Seeds Roasted Salted 250 g in Germany ranged from €1.80 to €8.00 across 55 separate records. The snacks aisle is as volatile as the fresh produce aisle.
Observed price range — selected products (€)
Source: Sivix, Germany, May 2025 – Mar 2026
One caveat worth knowing: "fruit and vegetables" in the Sivix category tree is broader than a greengrocer. It includes canned tomatoes, packaged nuts, dried legumes, and herbs. Volatility here comes from both genuine produce seasonality and promotional cycling on packaged goods.
Why this happens
For fresh produce, prices follow supply. A cold spring, a delayed harvest, a disrupted logistics chain — each shows up on the shelf within days. That is real-world instability passing through to the consumer.
For packaged snacks and cleaning products, the mechanism is different: promotional cycling. Retailers run deep discounts on high-rotation lines — half-price weekends, buy-one-get-one, loyalty card pricing — then return to full price. A product listed at €4.99 goes to €2.49 for a week and back again. Repeated across dozens of cycles, the average looks calm. Individual purchases land anywhere in the range.
What it means for you
The volatile shelf is the snack-and-produce aisle, not the electronics aisle. If you want to save money by comparing prices, spend that effort on cleaning products, snacks, and fresh produce — these are the categories where timing and store choice actually move the number. Debating whether a USB cable is €0.50 cheaper across the street is mostly wasted energy.
Check back here. The next story looks at whether this volatility follows the calendar.
Data source: Based on 1,910,799 price submissions collected by Sivix users across 13 markets. Data reflects real shelf prices as reported at the time of purchase.