Nice idea. A couple of small suggestions:<p>- Perhaps choose some base rate of inflation and determine if the product price has increased in line with that or slower/faster.<p>- Use a bold font to highlight the product weight.<p>- Use an archived version of the product page today - that will reduce maintenance time moving forward.<p>And a question: are you using net or gross weight? When using gross weight it may very well be an update in packaging that is impacting the reported number.
Nice.<p>I've got a constantly growing dataset of price and quantity history for all products in one supermarket's database (Ocado, the online-only supermarket in the UK I shop at). Doesn't include ingredients at the moment, but I do like the idea of that. Also only a few months of data so far.<p>Anyway, I've made it available as a website in a way that is hopefully useful – it is to me at least: <a href="https://ocamatic.uk/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://ocamatic.uk/</a>
I'm starting to see "cheatflation", Last 2 days -<p>Bought 3 granola bar boxes that advertises 6 each box. Open them all, throw them in a bag once a week. This week there are 17. Hmmm.<p>Taco shells, should be 12 in a box. Had 11 in one of them today (none were broken). I wouldn't be surprised if the "weight" of those bags of chips filled to 1/3 is a mix of settling and also cheatflation.
This, uh, isn’t a database? I clicked through to the GitHub and see only a hard coded html file with the small handful of Tesco comparisons, and a single screenshot. Where is the database? What am I missing? Why is this interesting?
I cook from basic ingredients almost exclusively. This avoids most of the issues in this article, but then again prices for these have doubled or more over the last two years. At least there it is more in your face.
Fantastic idea, particularly the 'shit' part IMO.<p>Realistically can the average person care enough to use this information, to measure value? Possibly some abstraction and scale for more casual comparison would be useful.<p>Normalising the idea of this kind of data and having a historical frame of reference like this would/could be a pretty solid resource, especially when looking at particular brands.
Well, very few items. Also, I am surprised in almost ten years prices have not gone up by much and quantity reduction is just about ~10%.<p>Seems to me these much-maligned supermarkets are giving better value to customers than much-loved restaurants.
What about some of the forms of inflation that don't have as easily measured implications, such as Disney no longer making individual movies available for purchase, McDonald's planning to end self-serve drink stations by 2032, and some
products no longer being available in bulk packages?
I'd love to see legislation requiring <i>prominent</i> advertising of any changes to a product that buyers might see as a negative. E.g.:<p>- Smaller product quantity, when previously sold at an apparently similar quantity (secret shrinkflation).<p>- Changes in food recipe (secret food enshitification).<p>- (maybe) changes in nutritional value or flavor for farm produce. I'm not sure how this is possible or practical, but I'm thinking about claims that e.g. tomatoes taste worse and are less nutritious than they were a few decades ago.<p>- Changes in non-food products that worsen performance. E.g., SSD makers switching to cheaper and slower components after initial reviews have come out, but still retaining the same product name. (secret non-food enshitification)