Digging into GroceryCHOICE

Earlier this week, South Australian senator Nick Xenophon raised concerns that the Government’s FuelWatch scheme would lead to higher petrol prices and that small independent petrol retailers were likely to be disadvantaged by the scheme. So it looks likely that the FuelWatch legislation will fail to pass the senate and then fade into oblivion. I can’t say I’m too upset about this as I have been critical of the scheme. Furthermore, falling oil prices have led to a fall of around 20 cents/litre in petrol prices which takes much of the sting out of the issue.

So now I am free to turn my attention to another Australian Government initiative, GroceryCHOICE. This scheme aims to “[help] consumers find the cheapest supermarket chain in their area without having to compare hundreds of prices”. Every month a survey is conducted of prices on around 500 different grocery items at over 600 supermarkets around the region. These prices are aggregated into “baskets” of goods in the following categories:

• Meat & Seafood
• Fruit & Vegetables
• Dairy
• Breads & Cereals
• Drinks & Other Snacks
• General Groceries
• Household & Personal Care

There is also a “Basic Staples” basket, which includes some items from each of the more specific baskets. Prices of these baskets are averaged across 61 regions around the country and reported on the site for each of the major retail chains.

Italy has introduced a similar scheme, which allows consumers to receive text messages giving them prices around the country for specific items. Unfortunately, the Australian scheme only provides prices for baskets not individual products (supposedly “to prevent the manipulation of the price survey”, but this doesn’t seem to worry the Italian Government), so for an Inner West shopper like myself, if I am interested in tomatoes, this is what I can learn from GroceryCHOICE:

Retailer	Fruit & Vegetable Basket
Coles/BI-LO	$25.05
Woolworths/Safeway	$24.63
Franklins	$25.70
Independents	$27.34

So, while I can save 42 cents by shopping at Woolworths rather than Coles, that’s only if I buy an unspecified selection of fruit and vegetables (possibly including Brussel Sprouts, which I would be prepared to pay not to eat). So, GroceryCHOICE would not seem to be very useful for me. Not only that, while the Italian service explicitly compares prices around the country, the GroceryCHOICE site makes it rather tricky to make regional comparisons.

I took this as a challenge, so I wrote a little script* to extract all the data from the chart and published the results on Swivel. There are separate datasets for the product category baskets and the Basic Staples basket. The data can be easily downloaded, so feel free to explore further!

The results are not too surprising: ALDI is consistently cheaper than all of the other retailers and the independents are the most expensive, as is evident in the chart below.

Average “Basic Staples” Prices

However, first glances can be misleading. For each retailer, these averages are taken across those regions for which prices are available. Since Franklins price data is missing in many of the most expensive regions (such as the Northern Territory), this is an unfair comparison. For example, restricting prices to just the regions where Franklins prices are available brings the Woolworths average price down from $77.57 to $76.26, making it cheaper than Franklins.

Looking at the product category baskets gives us a bit more detail (although ALDI prices are not available for these baskets). The following charts provide a graphical comparison of Woolworths basket prices compared to all of the other retail groups. Blue points represent baskets that are cheaper at Woolworths and red represents baskets that are more expensive at Woolworths.

Grocery Prices: Woolworths versus The Rest

Overall, this comparison makes Woolworths look quite good, but if you are wondering about that outlier where Coles is much cheaper than Woolworths, it is the Fruit and Vegetable basket in North NT. It costs $29.03 at Coles but it will set you back $32.54 at Woolworths, which is an impressive $3.62 mark-up.

To get a sense of the range of prices around Australia, this chart gives the full picture for the Basic Staples basket. It is sorted by the price at Woolworths and I could not help noticing that the cheapest area to shop at Woolworths is Outer Sydney North West. Isn’t that right near head office?

* The script used to scrape the data is available here (choice.pl). Coding tips are welcome!

Online Data and Charts with Swivel

I recently came across the OECD Factbook blog written by Jérôme Cukier, who works as a data editor for the OECD. He has an excellent post on publishing charts in blogs.

As regular readers of the Mule will know, I don’t mind posting the odd chart and in the process I have grappled with the less than ideal results that the Excel to image production-cycle can produce. Jérôme’s process discusses these challenges and illustrates the results of different techniques (although I had more luck with copying as a picture and saving to PNG format than he had, so perhaps the choice of picture editor is a factor as well). As far as possible, I try to avoid using Excel altogether for producing charts and instead use the statistical package R, which can produce charts directly to a number of image formats including JPG and PNG. Although Jérôme doesn’t mention R, it does crop up in the first of the comments on his post.

Jérôme also examines a number of online graphics services that were all new to me. Of these, I found Swivel particularly interesting. The site was established in December 2005 (giving it excellent early-mover Web 2.0 credentials) and allows users to easily upload, share and explore data. As an example, I uploaded the Starbucks data from my previous post and here is the chart that Swivel produced.

A Turning Point in the Growth of Starbucks?

Seeing me playing around with Swivel, Michael Michael suggested that I produce a chart of the Beijing 2008 Olympic medal tally as it unfolds. I took up the challenge, which was probably rash as I will now feel obliged to keep it up to date. Here are the results so far.

Beijing 2008 Medal Tally

The data itself is here and a chart with the overall medal tally for each country is here.

I will continue to experiment with Swivel, as well as the IBM offering, Many Eyes, so you can expect to see a few more online charts featured here. As a start, following on from an earlier post on declining CD sales in Australia, I have posted ARIA album sales data for CD, cassette, vinyl and digital formats from 2002 to 2007. If you are keen, you can also keep an eye on my Swivel page.

A Tipping Point for Starbucks?

On 1 July 2008, Starbucks announced the closure of around 600 outlets in the US. More drastically, on 29 July they then announced that 61 of the 84 Australian outlets would be closing.

Over on BeyondDigitalMedia, Chris Bishops posted an interesting examination of the challenges Starbucks has faced in the Australian market and goes on to predict that Gloria Jeans will suffer a similar fate.

Bottlemania Comes to Sydney

Today’s Sun-Herald has a piece entitled “Turning Water into Wine“, which reports that the prestigious Kable’s restaurant in Sydney’s Four Seasons hotel has launched its first “water menu”. Here you get a tantalising array of choices for how to flush your money away. My favourite is a 750mL bottle of Cloud Juice rainwater from King Island for a mere $20! At first I thought it must be a joke, straight out of an episode of Penn and Teller’s take-no-prisoners, nonsense-busting series, Bullshit.

Poor Phorm

Google and others have had great success with online advertising, while the provision of the mere “pipes” of the internet has become an increasingly competitive, commoditised business. So, it is no surprise that some ISPs have felt they have missed out on the real success of the internet and are keen to join the party.

The holy grail of advertising is to be able to precisely tailor ads to a behavioural profile of their intended target.  ISPs have one enormous advantage when it comes to profiling web-surfing habits: the one node of the internet that users cannot bypass is their way in, their ISP. Companies such as Phorm, NebuAd and FrontPorch have developed technologies to exploit this advantage and have tempted a number of ISPs to install their systems with the promise of a slice of the advertising action.

NAB takes $830 million hit

nab, the largest of Australia’s banks saw its share price fall by almost 14% today after they announced an A$830 million (US$795 million) provision on mortgage-backed CDOs (“collateralised debt obligations”).

It has been estimated that the US sub-prime mortgage crisis has resulted in over US$450 billion in write-downs to date and, earlier this year, the IMF suggested that the figure could rise to almost US$1 trillion. Up until now, Australian bank balance sheets had appeared fairly clean compared to their global peers, and they had avoided the large write-downs that have become common-place elsewhere over the last year. So what happened at nab?

Kwoff

This evening I caught up for a chat and a couple of beers with Dan Walsh, the technologist behind the scenes of the Australian social news site Kwoff.

For those not familiar with social news sites, the idea is that users submit links to interesting news articles (or blog posts, funny photos, videos or anything else that tickles their fancy) and then other users can vote for the stories they enjoyed reading. The most popular stories then float to the top where they are easily found by visitors to the site. This is a classic example of the Web 2.0 technique of crowd-sourcing.

Update on Sydney Petrol Prices

A little while ago I wrote about the relationship between crude oil prices and the price Sydney motorists are paying for petrol at the pump. The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) has now released their price data for June and, not surprisingly, prices continued to track moves implied by rising crude oil prices. The simple regression model suggested that average prices would be up 8 cents/litre. The AAA data shows a rise of 10 cents/litre in the average Sydney price.

Spam and Social Networks

Social networks have been growing at an extraordinary rate over the last couple of years. The big contest has been between Facebook and MySpace and recently Facebook was reported to have caught up with its older rival. These two social networking giants aim to be walled gardens where users can chat, exchange photos, share music, take quizzes and (more bizarrely) turn each other into virtual vampires.

A more minimalist approach is the microblog. Twitter pioneered the idea of the microblog, asking its users the question “what are you doing”, a question to be answered in 140 characters or less. You are also able to “follow” other twitter users, tracking their posts (or “tweets”) and they may choose to follow you back. Twitter has been growing rapidly over the last year (see chart below) and recently exceeded two million registered users and countless other sites are now following hot on their heels, including jaiku, pownce, identi.ca and kwippy.

The Garnaut Report and “Tit-for-Tat”

For those outside Australia, the Garnaut Climate Change Review is our equivalent of the Stern Review and last week a draft report was released. In this report, a nation’s decision as to how to act in the face of climate change is compared to the prisoner’s dilemma:

Effective international action is necessary if the risks of dangerous climate change are to be held to acceptable levels, but deeply problematic. International cooperation is essential for a solution to a global problem. However, such a solution requires the resolution of a genuine prisoners’ dilemma. Each country benefits from a national point of view if it does less of the mitigation itself, and others do more. If all countries act on this basis, without forethought and cooperation, there will be no resolution of the dilemma.