Ask HN: Are there any apps to track grocery prices in local stores?

Autoscraping the price tags, as the sibling suggested, would be nice. However, in real retail the codes on the tags are regularly as small as possible and sometimes do not even correspond with the one on the product (don't know how this works). Means you need to scan them really close, individually. You also can't rely on placement for augmenting missing/trimmed textual data on tags with identifying the actual item on the shelf as in many places it's consistently messed up (as if on purpose).

These are typically used to mass-import your competitors prices just by walking through the shop with a camera mounted on your shoulder. Or phone in a shirt pocket with the camera facing forward.

There’s a few white-label companies that offer these apps. Many of the barcode companies offer their own version of this app. They’re not usually available on the AppStores.

The reason for this is that each competitor requires slight customisation (font, price location relative to each barcode, etc) to get the best results.

The computer in the store that drives the POS scanners then can print out the shelf label stickers and a poor sod goes and replaces the stickers on the shelves.

This is all a big secret of course, so asking a grocery store for their prices is going to get you nowhere.

You could try scraping the websites, but often the price for online shopping is different to what is in store.

Best bet would be to offer an incentive for people to scan their receipts into your app. I don't know what kind of incentive you could build to do that, maybe for every 5 receipts you could offer a coupon or something. Not much of an idea and a massive PITA, it would also only give prices on those things that people bought.

edit: also gets complicated for multi-item discounts or combination discounts

Your grocery store would have significant data that it feeds its e-ink displays with. Capturing those updates could be fun if you’re looking for a project…