At the current price of $0.01 for 9ft, you could buy enough Trader Joe's Felted Wool Garland to wrap around the earth for just $146,000. Not bad!
Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
61–70 of 154 posts
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trader Joe's prices are famously the same across all stores. So that shouldn't be an issue.
That's a misconception. Prices are not the same across stores. I live in Los Angeles. Many times I've shopped at the TJ's in Silver Lake and one of the TJ's in Pasadena on the same day. Most prices are the same, but on many items the Silver Lake store is consistently 5-10% higher. I've also shopped in midwestern TJ's and noted that the prices were generally lower than LA. Products differ significantly, too. Items wit…
I've noticed a similar thing with Trader Joes in PNW vs California. The produce selection was different, the pre-made foods (like the salads, wraps..etc) were somewhat different, meat selection and quality was also different.
Part of it is that TJ's used to be much more about the 'one-off buy of a weird but tasty product'. They would find a product they could sell, buy as much of it as was possible, and sell through it, never to order and sell it again. Over time though, it grew to be the store where people went for basic staples, and so the way they sourced products probably changed to a more traditional model that grocery stores use, where many of the more perishable products are regionally sourced.
So what you experienced with the Sonoma Chicken Salad (which, I commend your appreciation, that used to be a favourite of mine to get for lunch) is likely a result of them just being completely different products made in different places by different companies.
Trader Joes in the 90's and early 2000's was a cool quirky grocery store to pick up some fun stuff and good wine to round out the weekly grocery shopping. TJ's in 2024 feels like Kroger standing on Whole Foods shoulders wearing a trench coat.
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#63Oh my.. useful!!!
Now do all the grocery stores!
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#64How are they getting the prices for these? Is this run by Trader Joe’s? I hope someone isn’t manually updating these. Also won’t prices differ by location? So many questions.
Looks like it is a GraphQL API from TJs.
url Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it funny prices rose as demand increases? That’s Econ 101 expected behavior
Except for a the obvious counter examples. Like food in general very in demand and very cheap. Housing very in demand but very expensive. So it’s really more about who decides the prices than what.
“Demand goes up so price goes up” is true ceteris paribus. For instance, if the FDA banned Ozempic tomorrow, you would expect the price of food to go up because many of the Ozempic patients would return to their previous consumption habits. But there have been a thousand other things that have happened which adjusted the price up and down, and most of those events in the past 200 years made food cheaper instead of more expensive, because the world increased the amount of food it was able to grow a lot faster than people increased the size of their appetites.
In fact, this actually demonstrates another effect: as something becomes cheaper, people will consume more of it. Strictly speaking, demand is a curve where quantity demanded is inversely proportional to price; if “demand goes up” we usually mean the entire curve shifts to the right. There’s also a supply curve: quantity supplied is directly proportional to price. The intersection of these curves is the market price; nobody “decides the prices” unless you have a monopoly or cartel or government interference.
Housing, incidentally, is a classic example of government interference.
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for a the obvious counter examples. Like food in general very in demand and very cheap. Housing very in demand but very expensive. So it’s really more about who decides the prices than what.
TBH, people routinely overlook the other two factors, supply and underlying cost. Sometimes increases in demand can both increase supply and decrease cost.
“Underlying cost” is part of the supply curve.
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#67Interesting! I’ve always held on to my grocery receipts for the last 8 years. I took pictures of them but when I moved a box got water damaged so now I only have like the last 3ish years. Is there any open source software that I can use to transfer these receipts into a useful csv? I have an idea for a few interesting data visualizations as I’d often buy the same things every week. Grocery bill went from like $70 to…
I have attempted this and the biggest issue is that sometimes the receipts use codes hard to understand. And the codes will change from store to store. If you're lucky, you won't need to go to a grocery store and determine what a code means, you will only need to map the code to an actual item you bought.
That’s perfectly fine for me. I can map the key items myself, the hard part is I don’t want to devote a solid 120+ hours manually creating the CSVs for 150 receipts.
Is it possible you can discuss more what you did?
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#68Made a little dashboard of the last couple weeks' changes
https://www.julyp.com/shared-widget/018d8a17-fc96-72b3-806f-...
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#69Very cool! It would be neat to be able to click on a product and see a price history graph as well (since it seems like you should have this data your db).
Agreed. Planning to add that next.
Re: Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's
#70I hope not, but this is likely to get C&D'd by the famously secretive TJs.