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Comment by jon914 | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty neat, and I'd definitely use this once it expanded to cover the stores I visit (WF, TJ's, Target) and a broader range of items. The one pitfall for the current market is that stores that don't run circulars or stores for which the circulars are harder to scrape are important but harder to get at.

For example, Whole Foods and TJ's are substantial players in the Bay Area market as well as discount stores like Target where there's a mix of the everyday low price model and sales on loss leaders. What are your plans to tackle stores like those?

Overall, this is a good start, and I look forward to seeing this fleshed out more.

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We support grocery items at Target right now. In the future we'll expand our coverage to include household goods like toilet paper, paper towels, and soap. One non-grocery item that we already cover is diapers, due to popular demand.

Trader Joe's is tricky because they don't have a traditional weekly ad. They do have the Fearless Flier, which includes some pricing information, so we may be able to use that as a source of information. Eventually we'd like to work directly with stores, and if we could do that with Trader Joe's it would be huge.

Whole Foods does offer a list of weekly deals on their website. However, they often use their deals to promote unique / novelty items like salmon candy and "meatloaf cupcakes". If there is enough demand, then we'll add Whole Foods.

Right now we're focusing on the low-hanging fruit of stores that have a traditional weekly ad. The complete list of Bay Area stores that we support is: Safeway, Lucky, Nob Hill, Raley's, Target, Walgreens, and CVS.

Thanks for the clarification. I missed the Target inclusion on the basic things I was looking for because it's based on the circular, which has fairly little in the way of food items.

With Whole Foods, the best (and most pragmatic) deals they offer aren't at all on their website and must be tracked in store. I think that there is a market for including Whole Foods, not in the novelty items, but in comparing natural/organic commodities that are popular enough to be carried by Target, Safeway and even Costco. On those fronts, WF is frequently the cheapest.

Do you have plans to, perhaps, crowdsource some of the price reporting similar to how gas price comparison sites are done?

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