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I've been feeling the price rises too, I second the Costco thing entirely too. I have a ton of receipt data I can analyze. I've been curious to track my persona

I've been feeling the price rises too, I second the Costco thing entirely too. I have a ton of receipt data I can analyze. I've been curious to track my personal expenses for things like milk, take out burgers, and other stuff I regularly purchase and have lots of data points on over time. I think the anecdata speaks, very loudly for the individual visibly paying more.

tharkun__ 5y ago
I would like to know more. My first suspicion is that most people don't track this data closely enough. Unfortunately after tracking this data for about 15 years, I stopped in 2018 (too cumbersome). I was able to tell you exactly how much money we spent on alcohol vs. dairy vs. veggies etc. If only I had continued, I could've provided great anecdata here, because we never really "go out". And herein lies the crux. Many if not most other people I know go out regularly. Rain or shine, recently got kids or not etc. So the pandemic hitting would drive up their Costco bills even if prices stayed flat. Happy to learn that the anecdata presented in this thread is from people like me. But otherwise my "felt" Costco bill has stayed almost the same (minus "normal" inflation).
- jxramos 5y ago
  yah the cumbersome part is for real; for the longest I never itemized groceries, just lump sums spent. I've been slowly automating more of the process. For online purchases I write some chrome extensions that scrape the order pages and downloads a Json file for me. Works for the most part and I'm looking to extend to a few more vendors: https://github.com/jxramos/webOrders https://github.com/jxramos/webOrders. All the data captured over the years omits very fine detail for the most part; things like weights and volumes and stuff. The data is fairly messy but there should have some signal within it however. This motivates me to revisit what sort of receipt OCR stuff is out there, it's been a TODO for a long time. I'm looking for mainly partially automated stuff, fully automate the frequent vendors, manual entry the rest: https://gist.github.com/jxramos/db8195d1972b6d7f7eb0e97be51d8369 https://gist.github.com/jxramos/db8195d1972b6d7f7eb0e97be51d...
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    Yeah before giving up completely I checked into OCR as well. However I haven't found solutions that are both easily usable by consumers (e.g. a mobile app) and actually is able to itemize and categorize. Everything I found was only able to figure out that something is a say Costco receipt and then categorize that whole receipt say as "groceries". That doesn't help at all. I even went as far as building a small mobile app using AWS OCR. I was able to itemize and categorize using that but it still required manual "fingerprinting" of each receipt type. Basically figuring out that something was a Costco receipt and in Costco receipts this column in the OCR'd text was the name of the item etc and then also defining the mapping of item name to category. Worked well enough but I wasn't willing to pay for this after all the free trials and such if it couldn't be monetized by releasing the app. And since the fingerprinting is pretty cumbersome and error prone (Costco doesn't even have a global standard for their receipt format, never mind different gas stations etc) and I neither have the expertise nor the necessary training data for a machine learning approach.

tharkun__ 5y ago

I would like to know more. My first suspicion is that most people don't track this data closely enough. Unfortunately after tracking this data for about 15 years, I stopped in 2018 (too cumbersome). I was able to tell you exactly how much money we spent on alcohol vs. dairy vs. veggies etc. If only I had continued, I could've provided great anecdata here, because we never really "go out". And herein lies the crux. Many if not most other people I know go out regularly. Rain or shine, recently got kids or not etc. So the pandemic hitting would drive up their Costco bills even if prices stayed flat. Happy to learn that the anecdata presented in this thread is from people like me. But otherwise my "felt" Costco bill has stayed almost the same (minus "normal" inflation).

jxramos 5y ago
yah the cumbersome part is for real; for the longest I never itemized groceries, just lump sums spent. I've been slowly automating more of the process. For online purchases I write some chrome extensions that scrape the order pages and downloads a Json file for me. Works for the most part and I'm looking to extend to a few more vendors: https://github.com/jxramos/webOrders https://github.com/jxramos/webOrders. All the data captured over the years omits very fine detail for the most part; things like weights and volumes and stuff. The data is fairly messy but there should have some signal within it however. This motivates me to revisit what sort of receipt OCR stuff is out there, it's been a TODO for a long time. I'm looking for mainly partially automated stuff, fully automate the frequent vendors, manual entry the rest: https://gist.github.com/jxramos/db8195d1972b6d7f7eb0e97be51d8369 https://gist.github.com/jxramos/db8195d1972b6d7f7eb0e97be51d...
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  Yeah before giving up completely I checked into OCR as well. However I haven't found solutions that are both easily usable by consumers (e.g. a mobile app) and actually is able to itemize and categorize. Everything I found was only able to figure out that something is a say Costco receipt and then categorize that whole receipt say as "groceries". That doesn't help at all. I even went as far as building a small mobile app using AWS OCR. I was able to itemize and categorize using that but it still required manual "fingerprinting" of each receipt type. Basically figuring out that something was a Costco receipt and in Costco receipts this column in the OCR'd text was the name of the item etc and then also defining the mapping of item name to category. Worked well enough but I wasn't willing to pay for this after all the free trials and such if it couldn't be monetized by releasing the app. And since the fingerprinting is pretty cumbersome and error prone (Costco doesn't even have a global standard for their receipt format, never mind different gas stations etc) and I neither have the expertise nor the necessary training data for a machine learning approach.