Getting a national perspective on food prices from GROCERYchoice

Since its launch earlier this month, the government-backed GROCERYchoice http://www.grocerychoice.gov.au/ shopping comparison site has suffered fairly heavy criticism, not least because it doesn’t offer detailed enough information on the composition of its shopping baskets or let you compare prices in different areas. There’s not much relief on offer for the former, but blogger Sean Carmody put together a neat script that gathers data from all the regions the site assesses and collates it, identifying the cheapest chains overall. That unsurprisingly turns out to be ALDI, although Carmody points out that given its lack of representation nationwide, it may have an unfair advantage. Read the full post for lots more insight into what GROCERYchoice can — and can’t — tell us with a little help. [Digging into GROCERYchoice]