Ideas:

- A "vibe shift" has occurred at work. Separately, my own thoughts have been more unkind/uncharitable towards others. Recently I realized that the two are connected. Isn't it funny how the vibe-shift trickled down to affect my own mindset without me even noticing?

- I think that Google is going to fall apart soon. Before they do, they'll cut money-losing boondoggles like, oh, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Groups... Who will step in to save all that data? And what does a post-Google world look like in general, anyways?

- AI is incapable of the kind of impact that is being promised. But we are still going to have a period of ~2 years until corporations realize it (it sounds like AI companies will run out of cash at that point). Until then, we're going to have a lot of layoffs because Mike-the-MBA thinks AI can do people's jobs. What should normal people do? Sit tight and sit out the game for 2 years until things stabilize?

- All of the above is part of a crisis of meaning that people - and esp. tech workers - are having. There's an enormous opportunity for Government jobs to become prestigious again. It used to be a mark of pride to work for the Government. You don't need to burn out and become a woodworker to "do real things": your local city government has plenty of "real things" for you to do in a real community.

Ooo, that is interesting. There was a website that kind of did that, but you could only compare single items at any given time, which kind of defeats the purpose (if it is to save money).

Ideallly I'd like to see something like a personal basket where you can add your recurring stuff (eggs, milk, etc) and compare the subtotal among local grocers. Bonus points if you add in value of store points + credit card bonuses (which might be significant, like 5% for Amex cobalt at a market coded as a grocer VS 1% for non grocer code like Walmart).

I'd like to do something similar to the "personal basket" as a way of comparing "value" at different vendors. Thinking of using $/100g of common sandwich ingredients to demonstrate how much "making the same sandwich" at different stores would cost you. I'm not aiming to use this data for a product/commercial endeavour, though.

That sounds interesting. What are you planning to do knowing the patterns? And isn't the data private?

I am making the data available for others to use for academic analysis and/or supporting legal action. The large Canadian grocers are known to price-fix and collude, and it would be interesting to see if there are any patterns in their pricing movements. (My contribution is "getting the raw data")

The data was posted publicly online on the merchants' websites.

To confirm, it is just posted in the sense of crawling the web site, right? They don't post structured data I assume.

Correct!