However, what I would like is a product where I upload my shopping receipt for a few weeks/months from the one store I go to. The application figures out what I typically buy and then compares the 4-5 big stores and tells me which one I should go to for least price.
Uploading a receipt to see how much you can save... that's a good idea. I think I can find your email via your personal site. Can I email you when we have a prototype ready?
However, I am in Canada. So can only test it once you expand there. Thanks.
I don't know how things are in the US, but it does seem like the grocery store oligopoly is squeezing consumers a lot, so tools like this are valuable for injecting competition into the system.
Thank you. Seriously.
Note: I searched "Protein bars", and it treated all protein bars equally. The 1st-20th cheapest had <15g of protein per bar. I had to scroll down to the 50th-60th to find protein bars with 20g of protein, which surprised me for being cheaper than Kirkland Signature's protein bars.
And/or also curious if there is a way to enter in a list of items I want and for it to calculate which store - in aggregate - is the cheapest.
For instance, people often tell me Costco is much cheaper than alternatives, and for me to compare I have to compile my shopping cart in multiple stores to compare.
A few years ago, I was very diligently tracking _all_ my family's grocery purchases. I kept every receipt, entered it into a spreadsheet, added categories (eg, dairy, meat), and calculated a normalized cost per unit (eg, $/gallon for milk, $/dozen eggs).
I learned a lot from that, and I think I saved our family a decent amount of money, but man it was a lot of work.
@mynameisash I'm curious what you learned... maybe I can help more people learn that using Popgot data.
I just dusted off my spreadsheet, and it's not as complete as I'd like it to be. I didn't normalize everything but did have many of the staples like milk and eggs normalized; some products had multiple units (eg, "bananas - each" vs "bananas - pound"); and a lot of my comparisons were done based on the store (eg, I was often comparing "Potatoes - 20#" at Costco but "Potatoes - 5#" at Target over time).
Anyway, Costco didn't always win, but in my experience, they frequently did -- $5 peanut butter @ Costco vs $7.74 @ Target based on whatever size and brand I got, which is interesting because Costco doesn't have "generic" PB, whereas Target has much cheaper Market Pantry, and I tried to opt for that.
Our main example is something like pasta. Our local grocery stores all carry their own brand of dirt cheap pasta but it’s not as good as the more expensive pasta at Costco. Comparable pasta at the local grocer would be more expensive.
For items that are carried at both stores, Costco is usually no cheaper than the regular retail price and rarely much more expensive.
We have historical price tracking in the database, but haven't exposed it as a product yet. What do you have in mind / what would you use it for?
So yeah, we'll add it. If you shoot me an email (or post it here?) to chris @ <our site>.com I'll send you a link when it's done. Should take a day or two.
I run tech for a reverse logistics business buying overstock from Costco/Target/Walmart and we’re building a similar system for recognizing and pricing incoming inventory. I sent an email a few days ago to see if you might be open to chatting.
It would be great to compare notes or explore ways to collaborate. Totally understand if things are busy!