{"id":4530,"date":"2020-11-03T06:44:48","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T11:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/?p=4530"},"modified":"2020-11-03T06:53:07","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T11:53:07","slug":"a-data-journal-on-grocery-shopping-habits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/a-data-journal-on-grocery-shopping-habits\/","title":{"rendered":"A Data Journal on Grocery Shopping Habits"},"content":{"rendered":"

For my data journal, I decided to track information about my grocery purchases. Going grocery shopping and cooking are some of my favorite hobbies, but it is only fairly recently that they have become regular activities for me. I have been cooking for myself since January 2019, when I was studying abroad in London. One of the most fascinating things I\u2019ve realized in these past two years is how much what I decide to buy, to cook, and to eat is dependent on my physical location and what grocery stores are available in the nearby vicinity. For example, the King Soopers in Denver sold a cornbread loaf I especially liked, but is unique to the King Soopers brand and is not an item I can easily purchase elsewhere.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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I assembled examples of the different ways that grocery stores tracked my purchases and data here: https:\/\/docs.google.com\/document\/d\/1uMLp2VzeTkmfopgoljgBvmGVvvWh2HuFCKaBUG_4Hg0\/edit?usp=sharing. This is an example of a recent, manual way in which we are keeping track of grocery shopping data:<\/span><\/p>\n

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All receipts specify the time and location of a grocery purchase, and as I always pay with a credit card, that information is also tracked in my bank account statements. For some grocery stores, I don\u2019t have an app or an account that allows me to associate a unique number with my identity and purchases, and as such the only records I have of my grocery purchases exist in my bank statements (and maybe in photos I took of either the groceries or the meal I made from the groceries). I was interested to see that the Wegman\u2019s app also directly records the exact time that a single transaction occurs, as opposed to King Soopers which only records the dates of individual transactions, or Safeway which only lists past items that I have purchased in a random amalgamation. Although I can sort my Safeway purchases by category or frequency of purchase, the app and website do not allow me to view individual transactions. For some reason, I was also unable to find the past purchases associated with my Shoprite account, even though I have definitely shopped there using the ID on my app. Finally, since I have been in Hawaii, I have been more strict about explicitly keeping track of my grocery store purchases, since we are now buying groceries as a household.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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One of the most significant things I\u2019ve noticed in my attempts to track down data about my grocery purchases from the past two years is how each grocery store app is designed differently and also records data differently. I wonder at some of the decisions made behind those designs. The Safeway app design seems especially brutalist, as it uses the least helpful method of displaying past purchases to a user. However, the information that it records about my purchases is used to recommend to me a specialized set of coupons each week based on what I\u2019ve purchased and might be interested in purchasing. On the other hand, the Wegman\u2019s app seems most thorough for specifying the times of my transactions, but this also seems like unnecessary information to record. I wonder at what data these apps are recording but not necessarily displaying to their users.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Having already mentioned that my grocery purchases are impacted by my physical location, of which there are a total of four different locations specified by my data sheet (London, Denver, Princeton, and Hilo), I would like to more closely examine what sorts of items I was repurchasing in one location or what items I was repurchasing across all locations and try to contextualize why this was the case. For example, I know that I purchased a lot more bread when I was in Princeton than I do here in Hilo. At Princeton, I wanted to be able to make quick lunches for myself to accommodate the more busy schedule. Here in Hilo, I rarely leave the house, and thus have more time to make a more complex lunch. I\u2019m curious to see what other habits can be gleaned from my grocery shopping data, and what that might say about me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Ruckenstein and Schull article about the datafication of health addresses the concept of a \u201cpixelated person\u201d, a person split into parts through their presence across digital spaces. I\u2019m interested in how this intersects with the concept that \u201cyou are what you eat\u201d, which is best recorded through a person\u2019s grocery purchasing habits. Ruckenstein and Schull suggested that individuals who have access to their own personal data could discover new information about themselves and take greater agency of their lives. I wonder if a closer examination of my grocery data would cause me to make any changes in my life. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For my data journal, I decided to track information about my grocery purchases. Going grocery shopping and cooking are some of my favorite hobbies, but it is only fairly recently that they have become regular activities for me. I have been cooking for myself since January 2019, when I was studying abroad in London. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2978,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2978"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4534,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions\/4534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/ant347-f20\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}