Being Surpassed

Nov 21

I recently came upon something that made me both excited and sad. I found GroceryGuide.com. As you know I have previously worked on my own similar application called GROP. However, as any user can obviously see, I have been beat.

GROP: My Idea

Earlier this year, I realized that there was a problem with grocery shopping. It was too difficult to just jump in and be able to figure out whether or not a particular price was a “good” price for an item. I would have needed years of experience in order to intuitively conclude that a price was good. And even that is not safe because the human mind (in general) is just not precise enough to remember hundreds of items and their respective prices. However, a computer would be most excellent at such a task. This idea was totally my own, and I was in no way influenced by other ideas to solve this same problem.

Therefore I thought that it would be worth a try to create a web application that users would be able to input their prices that they’ve bought items at. It would create aggregate data from said application such as the average price bought at. This would help users to figure out if a particular product was listed at a “good” price.

GroceryGuide

And then I happened on a site that had much of what I was doing. Okay well I haven’t touched the application in awhile, but we nevertheless had overlaps in our goals and application. Except it was nicer. And prettier. And probably worked better.

The best thing about it, though, was that it didn’t just have data from users’ input but it actually had all of the sale prices from all stores! This would have been ideal for my own application except I have no idea how they swung that. So either they are getting some kind of list from each of the supermarkets, which would have required getting some deal. Or else they possibly had to create custom mechanisms to scrape their listings online. I rather doubt the latter, and I am impressed with the former.

My Feelings

It’s an interesting feeling to be passed. I’m not sure, but I would think that it’s a pretty safe bet that GroceryGuide started before I had even had the thought to create my own web application. And now that it has an upgrade over its previous version, it seems pretty and functional.

I know that in life, getting beat happens daily. The old get older and the new get better. In sports, the younger athletes coming up will surpass you some day. It’s just a matter of time.

Records are made to be broken

is a quote that has already been stated, I’m sure. And if not, then there it is. There must be new ideas, new modifications, and so on. Sometimes the new isn’t always better. Just ask Hershey with their Change is bad advertising campaign. And sometimes that’s true. But as a general rule, beware if you’re the front runner because someone is going to pass you.

Okay so I’m not the front runner. In fact, I found it hard to even get people that I knew to use GROP, let alone anyone else. I had lots of ideas of what I wanted to do, many of which were covered by GroceryGuide already.

On The Other Hand…

There are still things that I benefit from by having my own custom web application. I can use it to figure out when I last purchased something. I cover items that are likely not covered by GroceryGuide (can you really seem them having listings from the Chinese supermarket??).

And Finally

Mine isn’t as pretty. It doesn’t have as much information. But there are still benefits. I think that I should continue to input prices. However, I kind of doubt that I’d put much more development time into my project. There were lots of things that I wanted to do such as:

• Make it prettier. This would have made people want to use it! People are attracted to good looks, even if they don’t want to admit it. This goes for being attracted to people as well. You know that it does.

• Throw on some AJAX to make it more user-friendly. This goes along with making it prettier, but it is a bit more than just looks.

• Improve the searching and viewing of data so that users who just wanted to look did not have to go through the same extensive process that users who were adding had to.

In fact, in hindsight I think that I went a little overboard on the database relations because I had a very Web 1.0 mindset of how I wanted to do it. Oh well, live and learn. Man this post is full of fun little tidbits of wisdom.

So congratulations to GroceryGuide for having a very nice (from what I can see) application. And I’m going to use it. But you know what, in some ways it’s still not as good as my own because that one is mine. But I’m glad that someone out there is working hard on solving this problem that very many of us have.