I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs!
Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.
Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price.
You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in.
Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.
From some minor historical experience with Mechanical Turk, I bet you could get humans to do this for one or two cents per receipt. You do them all three times for error checking for $0.03-$0.06 per receipt. I used to pay a nickel for much, much more than 5x this amount of transcription per job, and I got the feeling that I was overpaying based on how eagerly I got responses in and that I saw a lot of the same workers repeatedly.
These days, are MTurk workers simply feeding it into AI anyway, though? It's been a few years since I've run an MTurk campaign. At the time it was clear that humans were really doing it, as you get emails from the workers sometimes.
I haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.
Great article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *.
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
Apart from the comical cost of extracting this data from paper receipts, is it more likely that stores will publish their product costs over time so trends can be observed or be more like gas stations where no prices are listed. I have no idea why a box of Cheerios costs $7 for processed oats but i see millions of reasons to obscure that data.
>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.
This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read.
[spoiler: the tech caught up, the data is interesting]
Without 25 years of photographing receipts, weeks of agents coding and billions of token spent, I can predict that egg prices increased, and the graph of my egg consumption over time is concave, part because my income has risen, part because while all prices get inflated, eggs are still cheaper than other sources of protein, and I did in less than 1 microsecond.
I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.
I don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020.
My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
The AI writing of the article made me give up halfway through. It’s a neat idea but the writing style of these AI models is brain-grating, especially when it’s the wrong style choice for this kind of technical report.
the protagonist is interviewed as a one-man "focus group" in lieu of a national election and one of the questions he is asked is "What do you think about the price of eggs?" and he said roughly "I have no idea, my wife does the shopping."
This is the perfect job for AI, in that it's handling work the human didn't care enough to do manually. Although of course I don't care either. No value judgment there, just an observation. Imagine a place - a field let's say, part of a farm, long ago, but it had a road built through it, and thereby became a non-place, a patch of ground nobody dwells in or pays attention to or cares about, because when they're on it they're always heading somewhere else. The AI phenomenon is like that.
I think it's mostly been caused by avian-flu related shortages and rising feed costs. I've personally had an avian-flu disaster, it's a nightmare to recover from.
It’s so exciting to read more and more articles like this, using LLMs to discover clever solutions. I mean how many of us have dreamed of scanning years of receipts, waiting for that moment when you know a DIY solo application is at hand. I’m not being sarcastic, I too have a drawer full of Costco receipts which to me are data waiting for insight, not just crinkly paper. It’s more than being clever, it’s the realization of using a device not as a tool, but an equal partner who can suggest what tools and approaches to do. The end product of the LLM is not the point (although it can produce it better than ever), it’s the way an LLM can elevate messy knowledge work. A single person can now say that analysis knows no bounds.
The most surprising thing about this whole story is that he's been scanning all his receipts for the past 25 years. I've never heard of anyone doing this before and don't really know why you would want to.
Still, it made for a somewhat interesting exploration of AI techniques.
I did this, perhaps thirty years ago (rocking a flatbed in the 90s #ROFL)... for about two years. Then decided that OCR was terrible. I revisited on a multifunction copier, mid-00s — to the same conclusion.
Once this can be run entirely offline, with simple github installer [0]... I'll be scanning again. This definitely "reminesced a nerve" that "took me back..."
Unfortunately not looking good for accountants, among others...
[0] I'd recon the majority would use a cloud-based, off-device processing — they just selfie each receipt
----
Ten years ago I still used a smartphone; when the banks started allowing mobile deposit, was a very Trekkie day for me...
Hmm, I've been sending receipts straight into Gemini 3 Flash and it handles them just fine. No need for this whole pipeline and definitely MUCH cheaper. Am I missing something?
Expensive eggs are a political choice. Canada has eggs [1]. Mexico, too [2]. Meanwhile we have Tyson notching record profits [3] while facing zero antitrust scrutiny.
37 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 47.7 ms ] threadAlso ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
...
> I can’t wait to see what 30 years of eggs looks like.
At $2.70 per receipt, i'd be in no hurry to find out!
You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in.
Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i thought we had quite yet.
These days, are MTurk workers simply feeding it into AI anyway, though? It's been a few years since I've run an MTurk campaign. At the time it was clear that humans were really doing it, as you get emails from the workers sometimes.
I can assume this person does in fact NOT need to worry about the price of eggs ?
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read.
[spoiler: the tech caught up, the data is interesting]
I read a lot. This article, entirely.
"Some day, AI will be able to sort this out."
Now I'm just waiting for the token costs to come down ;)
I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.
My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
tons of options ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_(short_story)
the protagonist is interviewed as a one-man "focus group" in lieu of a national election and one of the questions he is asked is "What do you think about the price of eggs?" and he said roughly "I have no idea, my wife does the shopping."
Still, it made for a somewhat interesting exploration of AI techniques.
Once this can be run entirely offline, with simple github installer [0]... I'll be scanning again. This definitely "reminesced a nerve" that "took me back..."
Unfortunately not looking good for accountants, among others...
[0] I'd recon the majority would use a cloud-based, off-device processing — they just selfie each receipt
----
Ten years ago I still used a smartphone; when the banks started allowing mobile deposit, was a very Trekkie day for me...
Wow.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-r...
[2] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/
[3] https://farmaction.us/farm-action-calls-for-an-investigation...