How to resurrect Grocery Watch

Philip Coorey reports that Australia's entrenched grocery duopoly managed to stare down an Australian Federal Government initiative. That's no mean feat when you're taking on a government that has shown the guts to route around monopolistic damage.

The Australian Federal Government had promised to deliver on one of economics' biggest furphies: perfect market knowledge. Grocery Watch was supposed tip economic power toward consumers by telling Australians where the least expensive basket of goods were within their local area.

So what went wrong with Grocery Watch? It appears that old-style conceptions of data gathering limited the thinking of both the Government and its agent, Choice. The Government attempted to build its database of grocery prices through data feeds from the very companies whose behaviour it was seeking to modulate. Someone needed to exert just a little strategic thinking.

Here's what they should have done.

The Government should have contracted with a developer like mogeneration to write an iPhone app. An iPhone app that performed a useful function for consumers. For example, promising to price-check all the goods being purchased, so that the consumer can catch the store out when the check out scanner varies from the shelf price. (Australian grocers offer the first item free when their scanner returns the "wrong" price.) In return, the data flows back to the central database along with the geotag to identify the store.

Win-win. Mobile crowd-sourcing. It's a new era.

Comments

[John Ray]

I like it.. great idea