What is grocery?

Grocery is a public website that compares grocery prices across stores in West Seattle, built from a snapshot taken in mid July 2026. It tracks products from PCC Community Markets, Metropolitan Market, Safeway, QFC, and Whole Foods Market, and separately includes Trader Joe's full online catalog for browsing even though Trader Joe's prices are not directly compared against the other stores. The site holds tens of thousands of product records pulled from each store's Instacart or pickup catalog. Most products only show up at one store and cannot be compared, but thousands of items are matched across two or more stores using careful rules: the same brand, package size, and product variant have to line up before two listings are treated as the same product. Some items, like loose produce or raw meat, need extra agreement on details such as organic status, cut, or whether it is grass fed before they count as a match. A smaller set of the highest confidence matches show up across three, four, or all five of the core stores, so shoppers can see exactly how prices differ for the same item nearby. You can browse the site live in a browser, and the project also ships as code you can run yourself with npm install and npm run dev. A data pipeline script rebuilds the underlying SQLite database, the matching between stores, and the CSV export used by the site, and a separate audit script checks the pricing logic for consistency. All of the source data, from raw browser captures to the final matched products, is stored as JSON and SQLite files in the repository so the whole process can be inspected or rerun. Prices shown are the current displayed price, including any member or sale price, with the original price kept separately when there was a discount. The tool is careful about how it converts prices for items sold by weight, and it will not guess a per pound price from a URL alone. Coupons and multi buy offers are not factored into the comparisons. A gluten free filter is available, based only on the wording printed on each product listing, and the project reminds shoppers to double check ingredient labels themselves rather than relying on the filter alone.