This project was created with the goal of helping a typical college student afford food, but this problem extends to anyone who to save money. Many college students do not have much extra money to spend, so ShopBuddy was made to help everyone avoid overspending on groceries. For someone who may be new in town, finding the best places to shop for groceries can be difficult. You don’t know where all the grocery stores are and you don’t know the typical prices for the area. With the help of ShopBuddy, finding affordable groceries is accessible for people who are unfamiliar with the area and also for people who just need to save money. Oftentimes, both of these apply to college students, so it should come as no surprise that the idea for ShopBuddy was actually conceived by a college student!
We started this project with the Tucson area in mind, since that’s where we were going to school while working on the project. This is likely a good model for other locations because Tucson is a fairly large city (about 1 million people). It takes a lot of food to feed a city of this size, which allows for multiple different grocery stores to emerge, which happens to be the root of the problem we are trying to solve: where should you buy your food? Safeway, AJ’s, Cardenas, Trader Joe’s, Bashas’, Fry’s, Walmart, Target, Whole Foods? Obviously the different stores will sell different things, and even the same items will be sold at different prices in different stores. What’s a person to do? How do you solve this issue? ShopBuddy!