Showmethegrocery.com spotlights drink deals around the Valley. How much is that bottle in the window? Photo by Lauren Melby
For anyone who doesn’t like overpaying for alcohol, listen up.
Showmethegrocery.com, a Web site developed by Tempe resident Chris Caruth, 23, provides consumers with the current prices of alcohol at local grocery stores before they even leave home.
“Sometimes you go to the grocery stores, and they have sales. So you’ll go get a 30-pack for like 17 bucks, and then sometimes you go and it’s like $26,” Caruth says. “So I was like ‘I wish there was a Web site where you could go and look that stuff up’ … So that’s where the idea came from.”
Caruth was studying programming and computer systems at Mesa Community College, but has dedicated the semester solely to the development of the site after coming up with the idea several months ago.
The site is simple to use. Visitors just type in their area code and select their desired alcohol product from a drop down menu. Voila! A listing of the nearest grocery stores — complete with their addresses, phone numbers and the current prices of the selected product come up. In some cases the price difference for the same product was more than $10 from one location to another.
Caruth says he searched for sites that provide the same information, but the only ones he could find were out of state and the price listings were outdated or not updated frequently enough to be useful.
“Our prices are updated as often as [the grocery stores] update theirs,” Caruth says.
The site is in its infancy, and the number of listed products is limited. However, Caruth says eventually he would like to have the current price listings for all grocery store products, not just alcohol.
As is, the site serves its original purpose by providing the current prices on some of the more popular alcohol products, such as a 30-pack of Bud Light, a 1.75 ml bottle of Absolut, 750 ml bottle of Southern Comfort and nearly a hundred others. The grocery stores featured include Fry’s, Bashas’, Safeway and Albertsons and covers area codes in Tempe, Mesa, Scottsdale, Chandler and Gilbert.
Since the site’s release in mid-January, Caruth says it has received a few thousand pages views, and he is continually developing it with many expansion plans in store.
Contact the reporter at nicole.ethier@asu.edu.
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