When you go grocery shopping, do you compare prices? Have you noticed that many different brands do not base their product pricing on the same units? For example, you can buy sandwhich meat as $/100 grams or you can buy it as $/pound. Even worse is toilet paper. Toilet paper has four different values that you have to look at when comparing. They have the number of rolls in the package, the number of sheets in each roll, the number of ply's per sheet, and believe it or not, the length of each sheet (the width seems to remain constant). I have found that across the different brands, these four parameters vary widely.

How do you know if you are getting a good deal? Bringing a calculator is not going to help much, especially with toilet paper. You need a way to keep track of each brand, and to be able to compare each brand on equal footing. Using the toilet paper example, if one brand has 176 - 2 ply sheets per roll and each sheet is 10cm long, then you need to be able to compare all the other brands as if they also had that many sheets, etc. In other words, this brand costs this much, what would it cost if it had 176 sheets instead of the 155 that it has.

This has really frustrated me in my attempts to be smart with my money. To help put all brands on an equal footing I created Prices for the iPhone. Bring it with you to the store. All the products you have entered previously will be there ready for you. You may only have to update the actual prices of the ones you are comparing. A clear winner will quickly rise to the top. Purchase with confidence, knowing that you really are getting the best deal.