Today was ... interesting. If you followed me for the past months over on the shitbird site, you might have seen a bunch of angry German words, lots of graphs, and the occassional news paper, radio, or TV snippet with yours truely. Let me explain.
In Austria, inflation is way above the EU average. There's no end in sight. This is especially true for basic needs like energy and food.
Our government stated in May that they'd build a food price database together with the big grocery chains. But..
It would be nice to be able to bring to light the price gouging that is taking place in Canada with regards to grocery stores.
the responsible minister claimed it’s an immense task and will take til autumn. It will only include 16 product categories (think flour, milk,etc.). And it will only be updated once a week.
I mean that’s pretty pathetic. Better than nothing, but “only updated once a week” sounds like “the intern who has to enter the prices works only for 20 hours”, not like they created an API and told the grocery chains to upload their prices.
Unknown. I don’t use the grocery chains’ websites (I’m of the “go to the nearest physical store and figure it out once there” persuasion), so I don’t know what the complexity level would be. It’s possible that they’re all older-school sites where you can lift the data straight from the HTML, which is relatively fast.
So essentially it was possible over there due to proper/favourable conditions, whereas here it would be much more difficult?
I mean that’s pretty pathetic. Better than nothing, but “only updated once a week” sounds like “the intern who has to enter the prices works only for 20 hours”, not like they created an API and told the grocery chains to upload their prices.
Unknown. I don’t use the grocery chains’ websites (I’m of the “go to the nearest physical store and figure it out once there” persuasion), so I don’t know what the complexity level would be. It’s possible that they’re all older-school sites where you can lift the data straight from the HTML, which is relatively fast.