These receipts are AI fakes—but it’s more complicated than you think!

Alleged receipts from Edeka, Lidl, and Aldi are currently circulating, supposedly showing how much cheaper everything used to be. They are completely fake: The receipts were AI-generated and fail at elementary-school addition. But beware: This fact check has several plot twists. Because even though the receipts are fake, prices really have risen sharply – but so has your wage. Let’s take a look at which surprising things in a completely AI-generated fake are actually true:

These receipts are AI-generated with made-up figures

Before we get to the real figures, a quick word about the receipts themselves. You don’t have to be an AI expert to see through these fakes. A calculator, a calendar, and a skeptical eye are enough. Mimikama has already taken a look at the receipts and reports that one Lidl version even visibly bears the label “AI generated.”

Edeka: In 1996, you couldn’t shop in Koblenz on Sundays

The store on this receipt really exists: Edeka Kreuzberg at Hohenzollernstraße 132 in Koblenz. But that is all that is correct. The receipt on the left is dated July 14, 1996, at 9:00 p.m. That was a Sunday. And even on weekdays, stores had to close at 6:30 p.m. back then; it was only from November 1, 1996 that they were allowed to stay open until 8 p.m. Anyone who wanted to buy butter at 9 p.m. on a Sunday in the summer of 1996 would have found a locked door.

The 2026 receipt on the right fails on the total: 1.99 plus 1.49 plus 3.49 plus 2.99 plus 2.49 euros equals 12.45 euros. The receipt says 12.35. And the accompanying text explains that one euro was “equal to 50 pfennigs.” The person remembered incorrectly and halved instead of doubling. It is exactly the other way around: One euro is 1.95583 German marks. The euro was worth twice as much as the mark, not the other way around. Perhaps those with “the eggshells still behind their ears” could have given him some math tutoring.

Lidl: 20 marks given, 14.76 marks returned, for a purchase of 14.76 marks

The alleged Lidl receipt from 1998 shows a total of 14.76 DM; 20 DM were “given,” and 14.76 DM were also “returned.” The cashier would therefore have given the customer almost the entire purchase for free. The 2026 receipt gets even wilder: “Card €30.00,” followed by “Card payment €41.89.” The VAT table at the end adds up to a gross total of 56.29 euros, while the receipt total is 41.89 euros. As far as they can be read, the ten individual items do not even come close to that total.

The receipt is dated May 24, 2026. That was Whit Sunday. So here too: Complete nonsense.

Aldi: South logo, North app, and the exact same second as Lidl

Now it gets embarrassing. The Aldi and Lidl receipts carry the same receipt numbers (12345 and 987654321), the same dates (05/12/1998 and 05/24/2026), and exactly the same time: 15:42:31. Two supermarkets, two purchases, 28 years apart, and exactly the same down to the second each time. Even the VAT table is identical. On the Aldi receipt, it matches the total of 26.29 euros; the Lidl receipt simply inherited it. A template was filled in twice with a different logo.

CORRECTIV.Faktenforum already dissected the Aldi receipt in June: An Aldi Süd logo is displayed on the left, while the right refers to the Aldi Nord app, even though these are two separate corporate groups. There is no store address, and no deposit is charged for the cola. The fact-checkers test-purchased the products on June 30: Without the apples, they came to 15.28 euros. The fake receipt says 26.29 euros.

The fourth receipt doesn’t even have a supermarket

“Same products. So much more expensive!” appears above the comparison of 2006 and 2026, followed by the request “Save the post.” Better not do that, and save our fact check instead—a little tip. Nowhere does it say which store this is supposed to be. In addition to the seven-percent rate, both receipts show a share subject to the full VAT rate, even though they list only foods such as bananas, milk, eggs, rice, and chicken breast, for which the reduced rate applies. And here too, the totals do not add up: As far as they can be read, the 2006 items total 15.41 euros instead of the stated 13.91. The fake is therefore even wrong to its own disadvantage.

Four receipts, zero real purchases. All fake. The products and prices are pure fiction. That was the easy part. The fact check could end here. But you know us: At Volksverpetzer, we go deeper. And now there are several plot twists.

Plot twist 1: The receipts are fake, but prices really have doubled

Yes, the receipts are fake. But people probably know that themselves. They simply illustrate so vividly what people feel: that everything has become much more expensive, that prices have actually doubled. And in that respect ... they are actually right.

Really: According to the index series of the Federal Statistical Office, food and non-alcoholic beverages in Germany became almost 100 percent more expensive from 1996 to 2025 (our calculation based on the Destatis annual report and the current Destatis figures). The receipts may be AI-generated, but if it were possible to compare real ones, the order of magnitude would not be that far off.

So are the people spreading the fakes right? Unfortunately not. Yes, we are already at the next plot twist.

Plot twist 2: A doubling of prices in 30 years ... is “low inflation” and exactly what is intended

In the comments on the fake receipts, people keep saying: “And they tell us inflation is low!”—and that the AI fakes with their calculation errors would disprove this. But even if prices really have almost doubled, that still means inflation was genuinely low during that period. Even a low—even a desired—inflation rate leads to an almost doubling over 30 years.

The European Central Bank aims for an inflation rate of 2 percent over the medium term. Yes, two percent is the target, not zero. This is not a mistake but intentional, among other things as a safety margin against deflation. Two percent is not much either. But 2 percent on 2 percent on 2 percent, for 30 years, amounts to an increase of 81 percent—in theory. So anyone wondering why almost everything costs roughly twice as much after three decades: that is simply the mathematical consequence. (It is all somewhat more complicated, but that is the basic idea.)

For a long time, prices even rose more slowly than planned

In fact, things went somewhat better. The consumer price index rose from 72.0 in 1996 to 121.9 in 2025. That is 69 percent, or an average of 1.8 percent per year. Food became more expensive: According to our calculation, the index for food and non-alcoholic beverages rose by 98 percent, or around 2.4 percent per year. Most of that, however, came quite late: Until around 2005, food prices even rose more slowly than overall inflation according to an analysis by the Thünen Institute; only afterward did they rise faster, and then sharply in 2021/22. The pandemic and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were to blame.

What does this mean for the receipts? The 1996 Edeka purchase of 10.60 DM, or 5.42 euros, would cost around 10.70 euros today after actual food inflation. The fake claims 12.35 euros. That is exaggerated, but honestly, not by all that much. The Aldi receipt, on the other hand, claims 4.7 times as much, and the Lidl receipt 5.5 times as much. According to CORRECTIV, the Aldi purchase would have cost around 9.16 euros with general inflation, not 26.29.

So: Yes, food really does cost approximately twice as much today as it did in the mid-1990s. No, that is not proof of concealed inflation. But the fake receipts, which (in some cases) happen to show almost realistic figures, are still misleading! Time for the next twist.

Twist 3: Prices have risen. But so has your wage.

The real trick behind the receipts lies in what they leave out. They show two prices and zero pay slips.

Imagine everything costs twice as much, but you also earn twice as much. Then absolutely nothing has happened. You work for your bread for exactly as long as before; only the numbers are larger. A price comparison over 30 years without a wage comparison is therefore worthless, regardless of whether the receipts are real or come from Chat-GPT. That is the whole point.

And wages have risen too. The real wage index, meaning wages after accounting for inflation, stood at 98.1 points in 1996 and 105.3 points in 2019. The German Economic Institute reaches the same conclusion using net wages: The average net hourly wage rose from the equivalent of 10.21 euros in 1991 to 25.56 euros in 2025. According to the IW, rye bread has become 134 percent more expensive since reunification, and yet people now work almost one minute less for it than they did then.

Until 2019, the calculation even worked out for employees—and we all came out ahead: Food became 42 percent more expensive between 1996 and 2019, while wages rose by 49 percent. Measured in working time, shopping was somewhat cheaper in 2019 than in 1996. This was not a golden era; real wages even fell between 2003 and 2007. Until recently, shopping was, so to speak, much cheaper than in the 1990s. Up to this point, everything worked. But then came another twist:

Twist 4: Since 2020, wages have no longer kept up with food prices

And now comes the part where people with an uneasy feeling at the checkout are somewhat right. There is a good reason why fake receipts like these did not circulate before 2019, but are circulating now. People naturally notice that things really have become more expensive. More expensive in real terms.

Since 2019, food and non-alcoholic beverages have become 39 percent more expensive. In 2020, short-time work during the pandemic reduced earnings; in 2022, the energy and price shock followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Real wages fell by 4.0 percent in that one year. Since then, however, they have been catching up again, with the strongest increase since the time series began in 2024. But even in 2025, the real wage index, at 100 points, was still just below the 100.5 points of 2019. Six years, and purchasing power has only just returned to where it was before the crises. For food, it has not even done that.

Taken together, this means that an average employee today works around 14 percent longer for the same basket of food than in 2019, and around 9 percent longer than in 1996. One hour of work for the groceries has become a good 65 minutes.

That is the real figure. It is not plus 128 percent as on the Edeka receipt, nor plus 455 percent as with Lidl. The price increase is real, but nowhere near as large as these fake receipts suggest.

The pancake test: The gap is larger for milk, eggs, and butter

You might object now: An average across all foods and all wages is pretty abstract. True. That is why CORRECTIV.Europe has just calculated something very concrete: the Pancake Index. Flour, milk, eggs, butter—pretty much exactly what appears on the fake receipts. The question: How many pancakes can a person with an average income afford using a fixed share of their daily income, in 2016 and today?

The result for Germany: In 2026, it is still almost 17 pancakes, whereas in 2016 it was 20. The ingredients became 68.4 percent more expensive over the ten years, while incomes rose by only 40.1 percent. In 2016, Germany was still at the top of the comparison of 28 European countries; by now it has dropped significantly, while Austria is in first place.

The fact that the figure is higher than our tenth is not a contradiction. CORRECTIV looks at four ingredients that have risen particularly sharply, at a shorter period that fully includes the price shock, and at median household income including pensions and social benefits rather than wages. Both calculations, however, point in the same direction: Basic foods have outrun incomes. By 10 to 17 percent, depending on how you measure it. But certainly not by the fictional figures on the receipts.

The index also provides a distinction that is lost in the fake receipts. And an explanation of why things are different in some countries than in others. Countries heavily dependent on fossil fuels, such as Germany and Italy, are hit harder at the supermarket checkout by every energy-price shock, according to CORRECTIV. Add to that poor harvests following the hot, dry summer of 2026 and avian flu. This has nothing to do with the euro or concealed inflation. It has a great deal to do with Putin, gas, and the climate crisis. So anyone using the receipts to convince you of something else is trying to manipulate you.

The actual wage-price gap hits the poorest the hardest

A tenth sounds far less dramatic than the comments suggest. For many people, it is. But I also do not want to suggest that everything is not so bad after all. This finding is not an all-clear! According to a paper by the AWO national association, households with less than 1,250 euros net per month spend 19 percent of their expenditure on food and beverages, while the highest-income households spend 13 percent. If food in particular rises more sharply than everything else, this hits those hardest who have the least ability to adjust. According to the AWO, in 2024, 11.2 percent of people in Germany could not afford a full meal every other day.

To be fair, something has changed recently, especially at the bottom. In 2025, the lowest-paid fifth of full-time employees had the strongest wage increase at 6.0 percent, and according to the AWO, the minimum wage has kept pace with food prices since 2020. But for anyone living on a pension, basic income support, or a wage just above the minimum, the weekly grocery shop has become noticeably more expensive. People receiving basic income support are hit hardest: More than half of all parents receiving basic income support go without food for their children! That is a scandal. And plans are currently being made to cut this even further. This is where the anger over the fake receipts could be directed constructively.

What would really close the gap

Demanding the return of the German mark because of fake receipts, or suspecting some other conspiracy, does not solve a single one of these problems. There are proposals based on data for that. Three of them:

First, more competition and transparency in supermarkets. The Monopolies Commission, an independent advisory body to the German government, presented a special report on the food supply chain in November 2025. According to it, four corporations—Edeka, Rewe, Aldi, and the Schwarz Group with Lidl and Kaufland—cover almost the entire market. According to the summary by the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, food prices have risen by more than 35 percent since 2020, faster than in other EU countries.

And whether all of this was justified “cannot be conclusively determined” due to a lack of data. The commission wants to scrutinize mergers more strictly, while the Federation of German Consumer Organisations is calling for a price-monitoring office modeled on those in France and Spain. The retail sector disagrees: Competition is working, margins are between one and three percent, and prices have risen because of energy, personnel, and purchasing costs. A price-monitoring office could precisely verify that.

Higher wages for low earners

Second, higher wages, especially at the bottom. The gap consists of two curves, and policymakers can directly influence the second one. Since January, the minimum wage has been 13.90 euros and will rise to 14.60 euros in 2027. Measured against the reference value of 60 percent of the median wage, which the Minimum Wage Commission itself intends to use as a guide, a Bundestag inquiry found that 14.88 to 15.02 euros would have been more appropriate for 2026. And according to the trade-union-affiliated WSI, anyone paid under a collective agreement earns a good 10 percent more than employees in comparable companies without a collective agreement. Ten percent. Coincidentally, that is almost exactly the order of magnitude at issue here. Unions secure precisely that.

Third, targeted relief for those affected. Experts disagree here. The DIW has calculated that a lower VAT rate on food benefits lower- and middle-income households most, provided retailers pass it on. Austria lowered the tax on basic foods to 4.9 percent on July 1, 2026. The AWO rejects this as too imprecise and instead calls for benefit rates that genuinely rise with prices, free lunches in educational institutions, and a one-off payment for people receiving basic income support. And, of course: Drive the energy transition forward. If we become less dependent on the price drivers of fossil fuels, we can benefit more from cheap renewables:

https://volksverpetzer.de/analyse/tankrabatt-2026-flopp/

Conclusion: The receipts are fake, but there is a grain of truth behind them

The viral receipts from Edeka, Lidl, and Aldi are really bad AI fakes. They date purchases to Sundays when no store was open, give more change than was paid, and are full of errors.

It is nevertheless true that food costs about twice as much today as it did in 1996. It is simply not a revelation, but the desired result of around two percent inflation per year. Because wages have risen almost as much, the average person is left with an increase of around one tenth in working time, almost entirely incurred since 2020. For people with little money, it is more.

This is a real problem with real solutions: more competition in retail, higher wages, targeted assistance, and greater independence from fossil fuels. Anyone who instead holds an invented receipt under your nose is usually doing so to fuel anti-democratic sentiments or spread conspiracies. But you are smarter than that. If you want to stay well informed in the future, subscribe to Volksverpetzer or support our completely independent work with a donation.

Parts of the article were created with machine assistance. How Volksverpetzer uses AI.