Price Difference Distribution

It seems that 35% price difference (after VAT and currency are already accounted for) is the sweet spot for most retailers. I wonder if this is based on economic fact or just because Irish consumers are trained to accept a 30% increase in prices?

I was interviewed on the Neil Prenderville show on 96fm this morning, which is repeated at 0200-0500 tomorrow morning. I should be on around 0230 — not that anyone should stay up to listen to me!

The Irish Times has a piece today with more facts about dual pricing, conclusing that Irish consumers are paying up to 50% more for non-grocery goods than in UK.

I did only two proactive marketing activities: I twittered and I blogged about it. And nothing happened. Of course, I did this on Christmas Eve (hint: not the best time to start your marketing “campaign”) and I literally got 12 visitors. Over the next week I picked up ~1 vistor a day. On 30th December, someone posted a link in a politics.ie discussion (thanks Danny!) and I got 23 visitors. Then it was back to 1-10 vistors a day until 12th January when I twittered about dualpricing.ie in relation to an Irish Times article. In the meantime, Diarmuid MacShane of ValueIreland.com had picked up on dualpricing.ie because I’d linked to his blog from the about page. He asked me to write a guest post about dualpricing.ie and this was published on 13th January. I received 9 visitors referred from that blog on the 13th, but 110 overall since then. At the same time, Conor Pope of the Irish Times wrote about dualpricing.ie on their PriceWatch blog — this has gathered me 263 visitors since 15th January. On the 16th January, there was a little Twitter activity as people started tweeting about the site and Damian Mulley picked up on it (thanks!).

Since then, I’ve been consistently getting 50-100 uniques per day, with occasional spikes in the 150 range (mostly I suspect coming from twitter or perhaps email — it’s a shame that web analytics don’t extend to Twitter clients.

One other interesting aspect has been my contact with journalists: I’ve been contacted by an Irish Independent journalist but the subsequent article hasn’t appeared (update below); a Roscommon radio station wanted to interview me but I’ve never heard from them again; 96fm in Cork still wants to interview me but I’ve now spent 3 mornings waiting for them to call me back. It’s frustrating but not half as bad as if I really cared about promoting this site. I can’t imagine how hard it is when you really want to push a product or issue and are met by this sort of apathy. And this interest by journalists is no doubt helped by the subject of the site which is of current nation interest — God help you if you’re trying to push something that is not already on their radar.

Update: It seems I spoke too soon, as John Cradden published a story about dual pricing in today’s Independent newspaper. Hmmm… let’s see what that does to the stats! I’ve also had another radio station contact me. Perhaps soon you’ll hear my boring voice broadcast over the air!

dualpricing.ie stats

That night I coded up a basic ruby on rails application which did just that. I waited a week whilst the .ie registration was processed and then spent another 2 evenings working on the theme. Another few more hours here and I present to you:

dualpricing.ie

It’s a simple little site that lets you enter a store, an item and the UK £ and Irish € prices. It does the simple calculations to remove the appropriate VAT and then converts the £ to €. The items and stores are tabulated so you can see who the worst offenders are. Give it a go with the price tags you’ve taken off the Christmas presents (you did remember to remove the prices before wrapping, didn’t you?). I’m morbidly curious to see how the tiny server it’s running on will handle the load.

I’m trying not to be too judgemental with this site. There are obviously cost differences between UK and Ireland, and I’m sure Irish prices will always be a little bit more expensive, but I’m also convinced that many of these retailers are exploiting the Irish consumer. After all, if the retailers were just converting from UK prices and adding in a little Irish cost factor, why would our € prices be such neat numbers? Surely £10 should convert to something like €13.37 not €15? Anyway, it is not my intention to understand, criticise or justify these price differences — just expose them.

Didn’t all the stores remove their UK prices? Actually, some did. Here’s my notes from a morning in Mahon point shopping centre:

• Next: places a label over the UK £ price (but you can easily see through or around it)
• Ladybird: detaches the £ price (no doubt, to “prevent confusion”)
• Debenhams: dual priced labels except on fragrances
• Zara: No UK prices
• Ecco: No UK prices
• Principles: detached the UK prices
• River Island: places a thick label over the UK price (can’t see through it, or easily remove it like in Next)

Where stores have removed their dual prices it’s still easy to look them up on their UK shopping sites. I only wish I could make this happen automatically.

Ruby is actually a pretty cool language and Rails is certainly a reasonably quick framework to use (once you figure out the documentation and various magic incantations).  It took a lot longer than I was hoping to learn the Ruby language and understand the Rails framework, but then I was only working on it occasionally and I’m not a web developer.  It’s certainly better than writing Java code and adds another feather to my l33t programming skillz   Java for work; Ruby for pleasure.

• If it’s a “MonthDay-based” recurring event (e.g. 23rd of every month), then the monthday field must be present
• If it’s a “Date-based” recurring event (e.g. 1st August, repeating every year), then the frequency and unit fiels must be present

It turns out that the validates_XXX methods can be an ‘if’ parameter but it didn’t seem to work as expected. You can’t just do

validates_presence_of :count, 
  :if => recurring_strategy == "WeekDay"

but a quick Google codesearch revealed a more standard pattern:

validates_numericality_of :count, 
  :if => Proc.new{|s| s.recurring_strategy == "WeekDay" }

A more experienced ruby’er could tell you exactly what this is doing but I’ll hazard a guess that Proc.new creates a new procedure that’s called with the parameter s to test the if condition. Anyway, it seems to work. The only hassle I had it that in the strategy example they overrode the payment_strategy accessor which isn’t really necessary and makes accessing the ‘type’ of strategy quite difficult.

Years ago I’d tried to use Microsoft Money but no UK/Irish banks support automated transaction downloading so I’d spend 2-3 hours a month inputting the transaction data, correcting it and fudging it to make the balances match. Then I’d spend some time trying to categorise things so I could track my spending in certain areas. It turned out that most of the time I was just getting cash out of the ATM. And I when I started my PhD, I couldn’t even make Money understand that I was only paid quarterly — so I’d apparently spend 2 out of 3 months in serious poverty. Personal finance applications like Money are designed by accountants, for accountants or for non-accountants trying to be accountants or who need to communicate with real accountants. They’re just not designed for real usage.

Like a good software developer, I decided that this problem needed some programming and the idea was simple: keep it simple. All I need to answer is a few basic question:

• Can I pay the known expenses this month (Rent, loans, etc)?
• Given my current rate of spending, will my account ever go below zero, and when?
• Given my current rate of saving, when will I have X amount?

Instead of entering, tracking and tagging transactions all I need to enter is the account balance at a particular time. If my balance was €2000 a week ago and is now €1000 but that included €750 in rent, I know that my untracked spending is running at ~€250/week and, unless I get paid, I’ll hit zero in about 4 weeks. This is the basics of financial survival.

About two months ago I started coding the application as a C# WinForms application using lots of nice looking GUI controls, an embedded Firebird database and some base ADO.NET statements (yuk!). Development slowed but the need didn’t, so last week I started looking at Ruby on Rails. You see, I’ve recently noticed that the applications myself and Hilary need are all online: Gmail, Google Calandar, Remember The Milk, etc. On Wednesday I asked Hilary if she could give me 1 week of “us” time to work on a RoR implementation so that we’d have a functional version which we could start using. I’d might tinker with it, and possibly open it up to public use, but it gave me a defined slot of time to get things done and Hilary knew she wasn’t losing me indefinitely.

By Day 3 I had: the database tables written, Rails scaffolding providing the basic CRUD forms, user authentication working, accounts associated with particular users and balances with particular accounts. I also had some basic charts working with Ziya and account overviews provided by Sparklines.

Unfortunately my block of time idea didn’t really work out. It’s Tuesday night and I haven’t worked on it since Friday night. There’s a lot more to do, including most of the date manipulation and recurring events etc, but so far I’m pretty happy (although my eyes are aching from computer-ing morning, noon and night). It might have been easier with Python/Django (since I’m already familiar with Python) but I felt that was more info/tutorials around about Ruby on Rails (and learning yet another language can’t hurt).

Jamie Lawrence, 4th August, 2006

*This is a small script to “locate” your photos in “Google Earth”:http://earth.google.com/. It takes a GPS tracklog and a collection of photos, and generated a KML or KMZ file that allows Google Earth to pin thumbnails of your photos at the location where they were taken*

!http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/notebook/images/35.jpg!

h2. Requirements

* Python 2.4 (tested on “ActiveState Python 2.4 for Windows”:http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePython/)
* Google Earth (v3 works fine, v4 should also work)
* “EasyGPS”:http://www.topografix.com/ (for generating .gpx files). Free.
* A GPS device (most work with EasyGPS, I used a Garmin 60C)

h2. Installation

Unzip this directory to any location. Done.

h2. Operation

* Make sure that your camera and GPS device are synchronised to exactly the same time
* Make sure that your GPS device is recording a track log whilst you are taking photos
* Load the tracklog into EasyGPS and save it as a GPX file
* From a command prompt, call PhotoPlanet as:

python PhotoPlanet.py -g <.gpx file> -p <photo dir> -o <output file> -z

e.g.
python PhotoPlanet.py -g test2.gpx -p "E:\Documents and Settings\Jamie\Desktop\Test\test2" -o test2.kmz -z
* Omit the -z switch if you just want a KML file (which link to the photos on your hard drive).
* Open the generated KML/KMZ file in Google Earth and your photos will be added
* An example .kmz file is included so you can see what the output is like

h2. Notes

* This script makes use of, and includes, the excellent “EXIF.py”:http://home.cfl.rr.com/genecash/digital_camera/EXIF.py. I didn’t write it.
* The script does NOT write to the photos, so it should be quite safe
* Having said that, I’m not responsible if it doesn’t work or breaks something

h2. Code

The code is reproduced below for information purposes only. You should download “the full archive”:http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/notebook/file_download/7 which includes all the necessary files, a README (mostly this document), and “example .KMZ file”:http://jamie.ideasasylum.com/notebook/file_download/8.

Here’s a python script that iterates through a MoinMoin directory (e.g. c:\\Moin\\notebook\\data\\pages), then reads the current version for each page directory, loads the current revision of that page, checks for “#language XX”, and if XX != en (i.e., this is not an English page), it deletes the whole page directory. This is a *very* dangerous script to use. *Always backup first!* There are no command-line options, so you have to hand-edit the paths but, hopefully, this means that you will also read the script, understand what it’s doing, and then you won’t blame me when it deletes everything on your PC!

h2. Introduction

I started a PhD in January 2005 and needed a way to keep track of all my notes, the papers I’d read, the quotes I’d like to remember etc. Initially, I spend (far too long) writing a Java outliner to keep track of my thoughts. This quickly snowballed into a complicated project but wasn’t giving me what I wanted, so I abandoned it. Next, I thought an existing framework would help me to concentrate on the real issues – I tried using “NetBeans”:http://www.netbeans.org as a base but it was, again, far too complicated for a quick project. Recently, I’ve been using a “moleskine notebook”:http://www.moleskine.com (and nothing is ever going to make me stop using it) but this isn’t particularly searchable etc. So, I’ve been looking for a reasonably easy Wiki I could use on my laptop, work PC and this website. I chose MoinMoin but others may also be suitable.

MoinMoin is written in Python, which I am discovering makes it ideal for a little hacking. Until last week, I’d never written any Python scripts but then I started playing around with Python and the Amazon API. This gave me enough confidence to write two macros for MoinMoin.

h2. Installation

Download the two macros “BibKeys.txt”:/research/BibKeys.txt and “BibEntry.txt”:/research/BibEntry.txt and their dependant libraries (described at the end of this page). Install the libraries using their instructions. Copy the macros to your MoinMoin macros directory and change the extension from .txt to .py. Both of the macros need to know the location of your BibTeX file so open them up and edit the following line to reflect your configuration:

file = 'c:/Documents and Settings/jel03r/Desktop/PhD/reports/9mth Report/bibtex/references.bib'

h3. BibKeys.py

The first macro, BibKeys, creates a list of WikiNames from the keys in a BibTeX file. Insert this macro into your page like this

[[BibKeys]]


and you’ll get a list of the bibtex keys in your file. You can now go and write comments/quotes etc about each paper

[[BibKeys]]

h3. BibEntry.py

This macro, BibEntry inserts the BibTeX entry into the page like such:

[[BibEntry(Lawrence2004a)]]
[[BibEntry]]


The first line will insert the bibtex entry for the key “Lawrence2004a”:
@ARTICLE{Lawrence2004a,
author = {Jamie Lawrence and Terry Payne},
title = {Making use of Insignificant Interactions},
journal = {Equator All-hands Meeting},
year = {2004},
month = {February},
owner = {jamie},
pdf = {Lawrence2004a.pdf},
}

The second line is useful if you create pages from a BibKeys macro: It inserts the bibtex entry using the current pagename as the key. So, if the current page is called “Lawrence2004a” then is will have the same output as [[BibEntry(Lawrence2004a)]]

h2. Dependancies

These macros depend on “bibstuff”:http://www.pricklysoft.org/software/bibstuff.html, “seqdict”:http://home.germany.net/100-366919/Python/Modules/Modules.html, “Simple Parser”:http://simpleparse.sourceforge.net/ and “mxTextTools”:http://www.egenix.com/files/python/mxTextTools.html. These must be installed first. I’ve tested this on Apache/Apache2, Python 2.2/2.3 and MoinMoin 1.2.2/1.3.3, on both Linux and Windows.

Contact me via this website if you want more details, or leave a comment below