scootstah Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 Something I've always wanted to either find already done or do myself is a grocery shopping list manager where you could record the prices you paid and at what store, so the next time you added the item it would tell you the cheapest place, average price, etc, so you could plan where to go. It would have to be able to convert product sizes too, because I've seen some things similar but they don't know that a box of Dr. Pepper cans is the same product as a 2 liter bottle, and I guess in my mind it is. Maybe thats just me That sounds good in theory, but prices fluctuate constantly (at least around here). I bounce between 3 different stores for groceries. Sometimes stuff is cheaper in one, sometimes it's cheaper in another. If the stores had some sort of API you could use that would work out well. Otherwise you could try to scrape for it, or just do a lot of manual work heh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jessica Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 I was just thinking based off the last price I paid - this is why I need to just do it for myself because what I am thinking is very specific to my situation That's why so many of those similar tools don't get popular, everyone wants something a little different. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scootstah Posted May 11, 2012 Author Share Posted May 11, 2012 But how accurate would that really be? Or is 100% accuracy not really your goal? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jessica Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 So, what I imagine (and again this is for me, might not be useful to others), is a tool where I put in what I spent and at what store, for each product. It shows me how much I spend on average for that product, and where I've gotten that product cheapest. So it wouldn't be able to tell me the cheapest store for it if I never shop at a store that always has it cheaper, or a store is having a sale and I don't know. But I will be able to see how much I actually spend on that product. Then I can put in what I'm going to buy, and it can tell me if you get everything at store X, it will cost this much total: If you buy this item at Store Y you'll save $x. We usually do our groceries for 2 weeks at a time and will go to 4 stores but all in one day, so I'm not an extreme couponer, I just don't want to keep buying butter at Target if it's not the cheapest store I already go to. Right now I have it all in a spreadsheet, but when I try to convert product sizes to get the best price per unit, or compare brands, thats beyond my skills in Excel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scootstah Posted May 11, 2012 Author Share Posted May 11, 2012 What I'm saying though (and maybe this is just where I live) is that prices fluctuate for the stores that I do go to. For example I might buy bread in store A one week for $2.34, and the next week in the same store it might be $2.40. So my concern is that you have recorded that bread costs $2.34 for store A on week 1. On week 2, it might cost more than $2.34 and in fact be cheaper in store B - but you wouldn't really know that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jessica Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 I guess I could add an option to put in prices I saw (like in an ad) but didn't buy. I'm more interested in historical data of actual purchases than trying to predict the absolute cheapest places to go. If I figure out that we're spending $x over budget, I can look at things like going more often to get those sales, but what I'm envisioning is more of a record of the past. I guess it would also help because let's say I'm at store X and I see they have the product for 50 cents more than I usually get it for there, I know it's not the right week to buy it - and to come back in a week when it will be on sale. Anyway I've totally derailed the thread, apologies!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scootstah Posted May 11, 2012 Author Share Posted May 11, 2012 I guess it would also help because let's say I'm at store X and I see they have the product for 50 cents more than I usually get it for there, I know it's not the right week to buy it - and to come back in a week when it will be on sale. Hmm, that's a good point. Like I said earlier if you could plug into an API or scrape the page to try to find sales and whatnot and then have them SMS'ed or emailed to you, that would be pretty neat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thomasw_lrd Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 I've actually started a database where I keep track of everything we buy, the price, the quanity, and forth, and our income. I even keep track of sales tax. I haven't gotten around to writing any code for it though. It's nice to be able to run querys that say we've made $xx,xxx this year, and we've spend $x,xxxx on wal-mart, $x,xxx on sales tax. What I'd like to be able to do is have an app that I could scan the bar code on a product, store it in a database. If the code exists, then I can just enter the price, if not, then I could enter the product details. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xyph Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 Right now I have it all in a spreadsheet, but when I try to convert product sizes to get the best price per unit, or compare brands, thats beyond my skills in Excel. More derail! In Excel, put this for the column value =C4/D4 Where C4 is your cell with the cost, and D4 is your cell with the weight. You can do it the other way around if you want to see weight per $ If you have your other prices in C5, C6, etc, and weights in D5, D6, etc, and the colum you created is somewhere on the 4th row, grab it's bottom right corner and drag down. It will automatically insert C5/D5, C6/D6, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maq Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 I split the derailed part of the thread into its own. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.josh Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 I get what jesirose is saying. It's easier to estimate things like your monthly phone or water or cable bill. You know about how much you consume and with the exception of seasonal price hikes by greedy bastard asshat companies, you can more or less put a solid number down in like 2 seconds. Even easier for bills like rent or car payment, where unless some major change happens (like refinancing, etc..) that number is going to stay the same every month. But unless you are basically old and set your ways (ham and peas every tuesday night sort of thing), your weekly/biweekly/monthly/whatever grocery bill is a lot more volatile, a lot harder to pin down an average total to figure into things when trying to budget for things. Especially when you consider that for most people "groceries" is not strictly food; it's basically all the other non-major things you own as well. Other consumable things like toilet paper and soap. Dishes and spoons and forks (even these tend to be consumables when you have a houseful of kids!). Clothes you buy, random "office" supplies, esp if you work from home, etc... So with "groceries" it's not so much about nickel and diming things, but getting a decent estimate on what you're going to spend for the week/month on groceries, so you can work that into figuring out all your bills and shit. I don't really care if peanut butter costs $2.42 one week and $2.60 the next week. What I do care about is knowing that overall on average I'm going to be spending about $2.50-$3 on a jar of peanut butter, so that when I make a grocery list and I know I have x amount of money to work with, I can better figure out what all I can get. It's not an exact science and I'm not really looking for it to be. Okay, well if I'm broke and I know I have to make $20 feed me for the next week, sure, I do tend to account for literally every penny... but in general when I'm just tryin' to manage all my bills and finances, trying to figure out bills...I'm not really interested in looking at the money at that granular of a level. I spend ~$1200 a month on groceries (I feed a lot of people!) I'm just not interested in whether or not that jar of peanut butter was $2.42 or $2.60. I buy too much shit to look at it so granular. Sounds like jesirose maybe wants to be a little more granular than me, but overall same principle... anyways, IMO something like this would be better as a mobile app. There are already apps out there that let you scan barcodes and it will query some database somewhere and tell you what the product is. I'm thinking a mobile app that taps into that, and then allows you to enter in the price for it. Then you can easily query the numbers and get averages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xyph Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 If it can OCR the bar code, you might as well get it to OCR the price too Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
.josh Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 If it can OCR the bar code, you might as well get it to OCR the price too except that prices vary a little more than realistic/feasible "estimate" ranges depending on what part of the country (or world even) you are in... for instance, I pay about $2/pound for ribeye steak at my local grocery store...but I do live in farm country, where I can go pet my meal before I eat it if I really want to...but traveling around the states, I've seen it upwards of $10/pound even upwards of $20/pound in some places... or like a loaf of bread...I pay ~$1 (more like 75c but I round up), $1.50-$2/gal for milk.. but I've been to places that charge like $3 per load of bread, $5 for gallon of milk... even an overall "average" price throughout all of the US (or world) would be too much of a difference in my case for a lot of things... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scootstah Posted May 11, 2012 Author Share Posted May 11, 2012 If it can OCR the bar code, you might as well get it to OCR the price too except that prices vary a little more than realistic/feasible "estimate" ranges depending on what part of the country (or world even) you are in... for instance, I pay about $2/pound for ribeye steak at my local grocery store...but I do live in farm country, where I can go pet my meal before I eat it if I really want to...but traveling around the states, I've seen it upwards of $10/pound even upwards of $20/pound in some places... or like a loaf of bread...I pay ~$1 (more like 75c but I round up), $1.50-$2/gal for milk.. but I've been to places that charge like $3 per load of bread, $5 for gallon of milk... even an overall "average" price throughout all of the US (or world) would be too much of a difference in my case for a lot of things... Damn, I wish I lived where you live. Bread is $2-3 per loaf here, depending what you get. Milk is ~$4.50/gallon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xyph Posted May 11, 2012 Share Posted May 11, 2012 Mmm... Ribeye... I simply meant rather than 'enter a price for it,' you point your camera at the price and it OCR's it in for you. If you've got it scanning bar codes, getting it to recognize bold numbers shouldn't be overly difficult, and saves those with fat fingers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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