Any recommendations for web-based or Windows compatible grocery price book software?

June 30, 2009 7:28 AM

I'm looking for web-based or Windows software that can help me track grocery prices over time. Kind of like an electronic grocery price book. I'm hoping for something a little more sophisticated that a spreadsheet. Any recommendations?
posted by braveterry to shopping (3 comments total)

Just curious what you would need that is more sophisticated than a spreadsheet? I would think any functionality you would need from a simple price-tracking program could be had in an Excel file. Do you have specific fancy moving parts in mind?
posted by jckll at 8:58 AM on June 30

Worked at HQ of a grocery-store chain for a while. They had people whose job was to read the advertisements of their competitors and to suggest price adjustments. So could you expect to get any meaningful data?
posted by RichardS at 12:09 PM on June 30

I don't necessarily need anything more sophisticated than a spreadsheet. I just thought that software that did the job would be more useful to me. It could be more easily sorted, searched, and filtered, for example. Why go through the effort of setting up a worksheet to do all of the conversions to price-per-unit when I can just download an app that has it all figured out?

Concerning whether or not I expect to get any meaningful data... well, I honestly don't know. Two thing are motivating me to track the prices of some of the items we buy regularly.

1. I've noticed that certain things seem to go on sale periodically at certain stores. In cases like those it makes sense to pay attention to the patterns and buy low. This alone hasn't been worth the effort up until now.


2. The second motivation is sites like Amazon Groceries and Alice.com. If I can get some items delivered to me, then that will cut down on the amount of time I spend in the grocery store. The trick is that Amazon.com and Alice.com don't sell generic brands, and items seem to generally be more expensive. Hence my desire to keep track of prices.

I'm starting to think that this is one of those things that fall into the category of products that is constrained by human nature like estate planning services and budgeting software. I will say that this would be much simpler if I had an IPhone.
posted by braveterry at 10:51 AM on July 1