[LINK] Grocery Choice?

[David Boxall]

On 12/02/2010 6:22 PM, Rick Welykochy wrote:
> David Boxall wrote:
>> <http://www.woolworths.com.au/wps/wcm/connect/Website/Woolworths/Whats-New/Price-Check/>
>> Didn't someone say that anything like this would be technically
>> impossible or ruinously expensive?
>
> You prolly know this already, but this feature does not compare prices
> with competitors. It simply lists current prices and specials.
> Not very challenging to implement out of their own databases.
> Piece of cake I would have thought. Although one can use it to
> discover the differential pricing used by Woolies across postcodes ;)
> ...
That's similar to the information that the supermarkets claimed they 
couldn't provide for Grocery Choice. Now, they're setting up to provide 
it to potentially thousands of users (I gather Coles has their own 
version). If it wasn't possible then, it evidently is now. So why hasn't 
the government revived the proposal?

My guess: the major supermarkets offered or gave the government 
something of substantial value. What the government is getting out of 
the deal, I have no idea.

The supermarkets, on the other hand are:
- avoiding direct comparisons;
- avoiding exposure of their practices that could flow from mining the 
data that would inevitably accumulate under Grocery Choice;
- gaining a new source of data to mine themselves and
- probably far more that I lack the knowledge to think up.

-- 
David Boxall                    |  When a distinguished but elderly
                                |  scientist states that something is
http://david.boxall.id.au       |  possible, he is almost certainly
                                |  right. When he states that
                                |  something is impossible, he is
                                |  very probably wrong.
                                                   --Arthur C. Clarke