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Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

sakisv.net

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Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

#31

Post by barbazoo »

xyst wrote: post #29

Would be nice to have a price transparency of goods. It would make processes like this much more easier to track by store, and region. For example, compare the price of oat milk at different zip codes and grocery stores. Additionally track “shrinkflation” (same price but smaller portion). On that note, it seems you are tracking price but are you also checking the cost per gram (or ounce)? Manufacturer or store could…

Grocers not putting per unit prices on the label is a pet peeve of mine. I can’t imagine any purpose not rooted in customer hostility.

Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

#32

Post by sakisv »

xyst wrote: post #29

Would be nice to have a price transparency of goods. It would make processes like this much more easier to track by store, and region. For example, compare the price of oat milk at different zip codes and grocery stores. Additionally track “shrinkflation” (same price but smaller portion). On that note, it seems you are tracking price but are you also checking the cost per gram (or ounce)? Manufacturer or store could…

I do track the price per unit (kg, lt, etc) and I was a bit on the fence on whether I should show and graph that number instead of the price that someone would pay at the checkout, but I opted for the latter to keep it more "familiar" with the prices people see.

Having said that, that's definitely something that I could add and it would show when the shrinkflation occured if any.

Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

#36

Post by seszett »

sakisv wrote: post #11
nosecreek wrote: post #7

Very cool! I did something similar in Canada ( https://grocerytracker.ca/ )

Oh nice! A thorny problem in my case is that the same item is named in 3 different ways between the 3 supermarkets which makes it very hard and annoying to do a proper comparison. Did you have a similar problem?

I have built a similar system for myself, but since it's small scale I just have "groups" of similar items that I manually populate.

I have the additional problem that I want to compare products across France and Belgium (Dutch-speaking side) so there is no hope at all to group products automatically. My manual system allows me to put together say 250g and 500g packaging of the same butter, or of two of the butters that I like to buy, so I can always see easily which one I should get (it's often the 250g that's cheaper by weight these days).

Also the 42000 or so different packagings for Head and Shoulders shampoo. 250ml, 270ml, 285ml, 480ml, 500ml (285ml is usually cheapest). I'm pretty sure they do it on purpose so each store doesn't have to match price with the others because it's a "different product".

Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

#38

Post by brikym »

I have been doing something similar for New Zealand since the start of the year with Playwright/Typescript dumping parquet files to cloud storage. I've just collecting the data I have not yet displayed it. Most of the work is getting around the reverse proxy services like Akamai and Cloudflare.

At the time I wrote it I thought nobody else was doing but now I know of at least 3 start ups doing the same in NZ. It seems the the inflation really stoked a lot of innovation here. The patterns are about what you'd expect. Supermarkets are up to the usual tricks of arbitrary making pricing as complicated as possible using 'sawtooth' methods to segment time-poor people from poor people. Often they'll segment on brand loyalty vs price sensitive people; There might be 3 popular brands of chocolate and every week only one of them will be sold at a fair price.

Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

#39

Post by baronswindle »

barbazoo wrote: post #31
xyst wrote: post #29

Would be nice to have a price transparency of goods. It would make processes like this much more easier to track by store, and region. For example, compare the price of oat milk at different zip codes and grocery stores. Additionally track “shrinkflation” (same price but smaller portion). On that note, it seems you are tracking price but are you also checking the cost per gram (or ounce)? Manufacturer or store could…

Grocers not putting per unit prices on the label is a pet peeve of mine. I can’t imagine any purpose not rooted in customer hostility.

In my experience, grocers always do include unit prices…at least in the USA. I’ve lived in Florida, Indiana, California, and New York, and in 35 years of life, I can’t remember ever not seeing the price per oz, per pound, per fl oz, etc. right next to the total price for food/drink and most home goods.

There may be some exceptions, but I’m struggling to think of any except things where weight/volume aren’t really relevant to the value — e.g., a sponge.

Re: Tracking supermarket prices with Playwright

#40

Post by pikelet »

brikym wrote: post #38

I have been doing something similar for New Zealand since the start of the year with Playwright/Typescript dumping parquet files to cloud storage. I've just collecting the data I have not yet displayed it. Most of the work is getting around the reverse proxy services like Akamai and Cloudflare. At the time I wrote it I thought nobody else was doing but now I know of at least 3 start ups doing the same in NZ. It seems…

As a kiwi, are your able to make any of these (or your) projects? I'm quite interested.
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