Analysis Ideas

Looking for ideas and hypotheses to explore with the data in Project Hammer?
Here are some ideas:

  1. When an equivalent product is available from a "premium" brand vs. "house brand", is one being discounted more often?
  2. Are there specific times of the year when grocers like to introduce new products? Seasons for killing products?
  3. Shrinkflation - can you see a drop in product size, while the price remains the same? Does the SKU / UPC change when a product's size gets shrunk?
  4. Pepsi and Walmart collude to price-fix in the USA. Can you see similar patterns across Pepsico's brands in Canada? (the pattern: Walmart is consistently the lowest price)
  5. Visualize the price of making a standard sandwich at each of the grocers (200g white bread + 20g ham + 20g lettuce...) Which grocer is cheapest? (the team at SAVR already did something similar!)
  6. Is there a Nov. 1 to Feb. 5 price freeze on certain products?:
    Metro stated that “It is an industry practice to have a price freeze from Nov. 1 to Feb. 5 for all private label and national brand grocery products, and this will be the case in all Metro outlets.”
  7. When a product goes on "sale", how long has it been since the previous sale? (if something is constantly on sale, then that's just its regular price - and is a violation of advertising laws)
  8. When something's on "sale", did the price get jacked up artificially just ahead of the sale only to lower it back down to normal?
  9. How are different grocers responding to each other's price moves, on a certain product/category?
    • Is someone always leading price movements, and the others follow?
    • Is one retailer always reacting, and never initiates price moves?
    • Do prices for certain grocers move exactly in tandem?
    • Do prices move completely at random, with no interaction?
    • Do prices always rise, and never fall?
  10. Which grocer is generally the cheapest across all comparable product families?
  11. Do prices on certain "bundles of products" always move in tandem, at a single grocer? (think X, Y and Z always rising/dropping by similar amounts together)

 

Reminder: Canada has a system called "Supply Management" that controls the prices for dairy, broiler chickens, laying hens, turkeys and eggs. Expect that those product categories will move in a way that's inconsistent with normal market dynamics.