Great idea! I'm afraid this would require at least a hundred employees to keep it current and useful, though. But, as a society, we definitely need this. Maybe if some government agency could back it up?
A ton of automated scraping is what it needs. Just the main UK supermarket chains would do, as it seems rather British in the choice of products even though there's no pricing actually shown.
The packages are changing so fast/often now that the shelf labels, online sizes and unit prices are often out of date. (Yes this is illegal, no nobody cares because it's £0.05 per product and they aren't doing it on purpose, they just don't make it a priority to have correct data).
Why would this benefit society? Price per unit is a trivial calculation, and most grocery stores already show it on the price tag.
Change in price over time is irrelevant for making a decision on whether or not something is worth the utility to price ratio now. If you are trying to time the market on junk food, then it is best to simply avoid it.
If, for some reason, you want to prevent Mondelez, or whichever other manufacturer, from earning more profit margin than it historically has, then you can look up their public financials most of the time:
To put factual and open information out there of how companies consistently just fuck with all of us and get away with every little thing they can because "profits!" and "their duty to investors!". e.g., the biggest lies our societies ever came up with
It is already open information that pretty much every seller of everything in the whole world tries to sell for as high of a price that they think can get.
And that purchasing power of currencies will go down over time.
Inflation existed for currencies that were on the gold standard too.
There was over a decade of QE which the rainmakers said would totally cause inflation. It didn’t.
Then there were supply side shocks which would definitely only cause transitory inflation. Also wrong.
Then we learned that sentiment causes it, and in the middle of terrible sentiment inflation went down.
Every complex problem has a simple, intuitive, easy to understand wrong answer. It is not an exaggeration to say that we do not know what causes inflation.
Good point, cogently reasoned and well stated. I especially like all the extraordinary evidence you provided for your claim of inflation from 2008-2019. Thank you for your contribution to the conversation.
