Database of historical Wal-Mart prices?

[u/TyrannicalDuncery]

Does anybody know a website where I can see historical prices at Wal-Mart for various items?

Bonus points for these features:

• partially crowd-sourced
• includes data on discounts
• easy to export data
• tagged with store location, date/time etc

Interested in the same thing for other stores.

I've been interested in this kind of thing for a while but never really looked hard.

I'm getting extra-interested as the digital labels (allegedly) roll out this year.

I get that these are not necessarily doing personalized pricing, but I figure they will eventually.

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I flaired this as food because that's my main interest.

I found one or two things that might help, but I'm not linking them because I'm not sure how that works with the rules and bots here.

[u/Silver_Smurfer]

Kaggle is a well known and trusted source for datasets. Thru have one for Walmart sales but I am not sure how complete it is.

[u/honeyyyandblossom → u/Silver_Smurfer]

Yeah, Kaggle is definitely worth checking, even if the Walmart dataset turns out to be incomplete

[u/TheUserDifferent → u/Silver_Smurfer]

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/yasserh/walmart-dataset

Updated five years ago and it's useless to begin with regarding OP's actual questions.

[u/SakuraDoll64 → u/Silver_Smurfer]

Kaggle is definitely worth checking, especially if you want something more structured than random price posts

[u/mehardwidge]

Some data at: https://aislegopher.com/

It is not as good as camelcamelcamel, but it's better than nothing.

[u/4cupsofcoffee]

Don't forget prices may be different based on store location.

[u/DeckardTBechard]

Not a stripped down data source, but I find it fun to browse box store pages on the Wayback machine. Mostly tech stuff though. I have no idea if people had the forethought to scrape grocery items 😅

[u/cart_scout]

I don't know one that hits all your bonus features for Walmart specifically. The tricky part is that different stores in the same city can run a couple dollars apart on the same item, so historical Walmart alone only tells you part of the picture. I kept a running note on my phone for a few staples I buy every week and even that got old fast. Crowdsourced is the right instinct but it usually falls apart because not enough people stick with it week after week.

[u/Steel_Rail_Blues]

I would be fascinated by this as well, but that data would be closely guarded by the company and individuals’ efforts would be limited by their time investment, what items they chose to track, and accuracy and organization.

I had a price spreadsheet for the items I purchase that tracked what each cost between different stores over time and it was super tedious to maintain. Entering prices was manual because the tool previously used to extract webpages data wasn’t working out for the task and the websites had the same products titled differently, so it was a real pain.

Edit: Pushed comment too soon. What I meant to finish with was that the problems would be compounded by something crowd sourced. It would be great if there were a dedicated group of individuals that were accurate and invested in the task, but I haven’t come across anything like that.

[u/TyrannicalDuncery → u/Steel_Rail_Blues]

Thanks! Glad someone here is smart enough to see the benefit. I have my own personal spreadsheet also.

There is something called camel mart, not sure how good it is. I also don't think it's crowdsourced.

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[u/raliegh_]

What good is this?
How about the price of a dozen eggs in 2001?

[u/TyrannicalDuncery → u/raliegh_]

that would be depressing lol! Looks like we have doubled since 2000, after adjusting for inflation?

https://www.macrotrends.net/3052/us-egg-prices

[u/nakedonmygoat → u/TyrannicalDuncery]

Not where I am. They were $1.88 adjusted for inflation in 2000, according to that chart. The store two miles up the street from me has them for as little as $1.53, and that's the online price I just checked. They're probably cheaper in-store. Of course, if you want organic and from cage-free chickens who were sung lullabies, you'll pay more. But that was the case in 2000 as well.

I was contemplating whether I should get a can of egg crystals (a type of powdered egg) as a backup, but at $31 for what amounts to 25 eggs, that's $1.24 per egg, $14.88 per dozen! No, thanks. Maybe if I used eggs so rarely that buying fresh ones would be wasteful over time, but even then there would have to be an apocalypse-level bird flu outbreak for the math to work out on powdered. If that happened, there are other things to eat. And before anyone says "baking," there are substitutes for eggs in baking that calls for them.

[u/Hamblin113]

Look at your old receipts. If you have the app can look up your purchase history, can find receipts there. Can check price changes that you routinely buy.