It would be nice to be able to bring to light the price gouging that is taking place in Canada with regards to grocery stores.
The project is Open source, so you might be able to leverage it for Canadian data. All you need is:
- Understanding of the expected format for the project
- Access to data from Canadian retailers. This can be acquired via APIs (these are usually free) or by scraping their sites.
At the bottom of the chain on mastodon the creator says they use the search APIs of the store websites. I wouldn’t have expected those to be easily accessible!
Yeah a lot of chains even have a documented, developer-friendly API. If that’s not available though, you can usually figure out the API just by looking at the calls your browser makes when visiting a page. Most sites use a REST API for catalog pages that’s then rendered out with JavaScript.
If that doesn’t work, then you can usually scrape everything with Selenium. It’s a little harder to do, but still quite manageable, though that usually has to be a background job, as it’s slow.
I know of one in Alberta.
Are we looking to expand what’s here on the Grocery Tracker to incorporate what they are doing with the Austrian site?
I’d also like to look at other pinch points of government heel dragging. Housing, energy, medical, transportation, telecom, news etc. We all see these government contracts go out for seven figures and it’s always shown to be blown out of proportion.
A nice added bonus to the project in Austria was someone giving historical data. It would be great to have a similar leg up for Canada.
Nice find! This looks like exactly it, but Canadian.
deleted by creator
With the advent of e-ink price tags, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if something similar goes on with the prices of generic and medium tier items.
We’d have to see if an API is available somewhere first.
Even without an API it should be possible, in theory, to just parse the data directly from their websites.
This also gives the grocery stores less of a leg to stand on in terms of legal or practical recourse. They chose to create a publicly browsable database of their prices; all you’re doing is browsing it.
Huh. Now you’ve got me wondering… Could you leave a device hidden in store that receives the IR signals that program the tags, capture that information, then parse it out later? You could literally log prices changes at the shelves, in real time.
I don’t think they’re IR. Something similar to wifi. Surely encrypted.
Looks like there are two varieties - IR or Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE).
Would a system identifying products from a recipt work for this? combined with other data sources (like web scraping) it would make it a lot easier to crowdsource the data, even if only sortaa technically inclined people do it
If you do get started with this, I’d love to follow along and find a place where I can help. If you guys make a community or mastodon account for example, please link it :)
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but check out this Marketplace piece:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/marketplace-shrinkflation-1.6654780
Pretty easy to get something basic set up if you get enough people to crowd-source data with photos of stuff in grocery stores and their receipts, along with some scraping to get data that’s available online. It’s a project that’s been on my backlog for a while, but I can bump it up if others want to join me in making this.
Can’t, this would be illegal within a year. Scraping data is already taboo. How fucking dumb is that.
Its why I hate the ’ starving artist worried about AI scrapping’ stories. It will be used to usher in stronger laws to prevent us from scraping this data. Its a double edged sword.
