Egg receipts for 25 years

John Rush has been scanning his receipts for 25 years. He did something with the collection this year.

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 year I tested it. Two AI coding agents, 11,345 receipts. I started with eggs. If you can track one item across 25 years of garbled thermal prints, OCR failures, and folder typos, you can track anything.

This made me think about those science fiction stories with people who freeze themselves hoping to wake in an era when cures to their terminal disease become available. It’s the sales receipt data version. Twenty-five years is a long time to collect data.

[Thanks, Charlotte]