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Comment by sanggonlee | Hacker News Reader

This is cool! Whenever I see these kinds of apps though, I wonder where do you get the data? Is there a public API for all the grocery products in the US or something?

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It is for Walmarts only per the info page. There must be a way to scrape that from their online grocery shopping website even without an api.

Naive as I am (& not living in the US), I've always thought these supermarket chains have uniform pricing and that's one reason why they're so popular.

Anything produce related is going to fluctuate based on location. This is because most produce is bought within some distance of the store (ex: 100 miles).

> This is because most produce is bought within some distance of the store (ex: 100 miles).

Living in Canada, this is rarely the case (probably because it's too cold here to grow... most things.) Here in Vancouver, our strawberries comes up the coast from California; our lettuce tends to come all the way from Mexico; etc.

You might be surprised how many things are actually local; vegetables and fruits are the most likely to be shipped long distances (and other things that keep well like potatoes, etc).

But milk and dairy and eggs are often packaged relatively close; but you might not know it unless you know how to read the packaging codes.

I think this is not accurate for walmart specifically. My local hannaford will buy potatoes from my home town up north, but Walmart doesn't, and neither does Five Guys, the bastards!

Why would uniform pricing make a difference to anyone? Most people go to one or two stores.

I would be shocked if Walmart hasn't done the research to determine how high they can raise prices in a given area before people venture further out or to competitors. I'd be willing to bet affluence of area and distance to alternatives are significant factors in the pricing algorithm.

This is just one brand of eggs from one store (see info pop out). Since that store has local online ordering that matches store price, you could probably scrape it as a good practice exercise in building scrapers.

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