Show HN: Daily price tracking for Trader Joe's

Modern tracking isn't bulletproof, but also not futile.

Or... you could change it to something funnier, like "Pumpkin Body Butter"

Indeed, he spelled it the right way, which is the wrong way. He should spell it wrong, which is the right way. :)

I think it is funny that this misspelling hasn't been fixed after all of these years. It was typo'ed in the original http spec in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

I run paperless on an Unraid server at home and it works really well. It has "machine learning" (based on a model that you host yourself that grows as you use it). It has good search, impressive OCR, and generally works really well.

My only complaint is that it lacks a good organization workflow. I have a shared network folder and any file (image, pdf, etc) that you put on that folder gets immediately consumed into Paperless. This happens almost immediately. I have a printer/scanner that allows me to scan to a SMB network drive. So I configured any scans from it to go to that shared folder, which makes integration really nice. I also use GeniusScan on my phone to scan to the same network drive (which requires pro, which is ~$16 a year I think). Genius Scan can save locally to your phone and upload later when you get home, which makes for a good workflow. The problem is that once it gets into Paperless, there's not a good workflow for reviewing and labeling the file. I have been meaning to sit down and provide a contribution to the open source project to improve this, but haven't found the time to do it yet. This is the biggest weakness of the project imo.

For those that have never used paperless. The naming may confuse you. It started off as an open source project named paperless. Then it got abandoned and a team picked it up to update it and make it more modern, and they renamed it paperless-ng (for angular I assume, the new frontend). Then that project lost momentum, so it was forked again and is now paperless-ngx which is the current iteration of it. It currently has a very strong community and gets good updates.

I'd look into a document scanner for ease of use. They even have ones that auto loads, so no more waiting around. With that said, if you purchase a scanner, it probably already has proprietary OCR, and they have auto feeding ones for many documents. I foolishly bought one not knowing auto feeding was an option. https://youtu.be/fi0ZhTFaW7w I bought a brother 2 sided one since it had Linux drivers.

Hmm, yeah I suppose anything promoting consumer knowledge would be antithesis to ordinary business schemes.

Pie in the sky, alas.

Maybe they could grab some preventative lobby money with the threat of it. /s

To the brim, for sure.

Probably one day we'll have a "citizen preferences file" where the confidentiality of our interactions with various entities can be granularly set.

Yes, just awkwardly punch in your email address into this miscalibrated POS keypad so we can “only send you your receipt”*

* May also enroll you in “helpful” store newsletters and sell your email to every company on your grocery store receipt.

Ahem. Referal. :D

I love the idea of pricing over time. It seems like things jump around in 50 cent increments quite a bit. Would be interesting to graph it. I wonder if you'd be able to gather enough data before TJ's decides to implement better endpoint security, though. Having tried to do something similar with airline website data, they sure can make it challenging.

iphones dropped in price?

It doesn't really make sense to talk about a single product from a single supplier when talking about supply and demand. You completely leave out the competition side that drives the whole system.

Econ 101 explains those counter examples as well: Food has high demand but lots of competition and easy substitution (rice expensive? buy pasta). Housing supply is limited (by location but often artificially via regulation) and substitution is difficult (have to move).

TBH, people routinely overlook the other two factors, supply and underlying cost.

Sometimes increases in demand can both increase supply and decrease cost.

“Demand goes up so price goes up” is true ceteris paribus. For instance, if the FDA banned Ozempic tomorrow, you would expect the price of food to go up because many of the Ozempic patients would return to their previous consumption habits. But there have been a thousand other things that have happened which adjusted the price up and down, and most of those events in the past 200 years made food cheaper instead of more expensive, because the world increased the amount of food it was able to grow a lot faster than people increased the size of their appetites.

In fact, this actually demonstrates another effect: as something becomes cheaper, people will consume more of it. Strictly speaking, demand is a curve where quantity demanded is inversely proportional to price; if “demand goes up” we usually mean the entire curve shifts to the right. There’s also a supply curve: quantity supplied is directly proportional to price. The intersection of these curves is the market price; nobody “decides the prices” unless you have a monopoly or cartel or government interference.

Housing, incidentally, is a classic example of government interference.

I don't have any hard data to add, but on the face of it this just seems wrong. Their cheese is famously good-for-price / cheap-for-quality, and I think their fresh produce is very competitive as well.

I've noticed a similar thing with Trader Joes in PNW vs California. The produce selection was different, the pre-made foods (like the salads, wraps..etc) were somewhat different, meat selection and quality was also different.

Part of it is that TJ's used to be much more about the 'one-off buy of a weird but tasty product'. They would find a product they could sell, buy as much of it as was possible, and sell through it, never to order and sell it again. Over time though, it grew to be the store where people went for basic staples, and so the way they sourced products probably changed to a more traditional model that grocery stores use, where many of the more perishable products are regionally sourced.

So what you experienced with the Sonoma Chicken Salad (which, I commend your appreciation, that used to be a favourite of mine to get for lunch) is likely a result of them just being completely different products made in different places by different companies.

Trader Joes in the 90's and early 2000's was a cool quirky grocery store to pick up some fun stuff and good wine to round out the weekly grocery shopping. TJ's in 2024 feels like Kroger standing on Whole Foods shoulders wearing a trench coat.

Are you sure?

They list prices on their website even without a local store selected. And then picking a local store in different locations, I can't find any prices that change.

I mean, obviously there might be exceptions. And I assume local produce varies, the same way it varies in every supermarket not just by the season but by the week. Most fresh produce isn't even listed on their site, and things like fresh salads are going to be based on local produce prices. (E.g. this daily price tracker doesn't have any entries for apples of any kind, for instance.)

But I can't find any evidence of any Trader Joe's products (whether frozen or snacks or jarred or bakery) having different prices between stores. Which is what I meant -- the stuff on their website. But it's good to clarify the difference between that and fresh produce.

(I could always be wrong, but you can find it repeated all over forums that Trader Joe's prices are the same everywhere, and they are in my experience as well -- it seems to be "common knowledge".)

Which is really odd, since Texas is so liberty and free-market minded.