About the Saint Lucia Price Tracker
A public, independent effort to make retail prices in Saint Lucia more transparent. It lets anyone search captured products, compare prices by category and source market, and follow how prices change over time.
Our mission
Price information should be easy to find and easy to understand. The tracker collects real retail prices, organizes them into neutral categories, and publishes them as open data so shoppers and researchers can make informed choices.
How the data is collected
- Prices are captured from public retail pages that anyone can view in a normal web browser.
- No login and no private data are used. The tracker only reads information that is already publicly visible.
- Captured data is imported locally and QA-checked before it is published to this site.
- Every price shows its source market and capture date. Captured from a public retail page. No endorsement or affiliation is implied.
What to keep in mind
- Prices may change at the source after capture. The price shown reflects the capture date listed, not necessarily the current in-store price.
- These are not official government statistics. The tracker is an independent project and prices here are not endorsed by any retailer or government body.
- Coverage reflects only what has been captured. The tracker does not claim full, daily, or nationwide coverage.
How this site is funded
The tracker is free to use. Hosting, the domain, and the time spent capturing and checking prices all cost money. To help cover those costs, the site shows a limited number of ads through Google AdSense.
Google picks the ads automatically. We do not choose or endorse them, and an ad does not mean we have a relationship with the advertiser. We do not take payment from any retailer, brand, or manufacturer for including a product, placing it higher, or changing how it appears. Money from ads goes toward running and maintaining the site. See the Privacy Notice for how Google advertising cookies work.
Funding does not change the data. What we publish, how categories are grouped, and the order things appear still follow the methodology above.
Categories and source markets
Products are grouped into the tracker's own neutral public categories for browsing. These do not copy any single retailer's category labels. Massy Stores Saint Lucia is the first source market; the data model is built so that other retailers can be added later without changing how the site works.
Basket, index & inflation
A staples basket, price index, and inflation-style insights may be added later, but only once there is enough repeated history to support them honestly. Until then, the Insights page intentionally stays empty rather than showing invented numbers.
Energy prices: how we compare them to oil
The Energy prices page puts Saint Lucia's official monthly energy prices (fuel, cooking gas, and electricity) next to world crude-oil prices, so you can see how closely local prices track oil and where they don't. Local figures are the regulated prices published by the Government of Saint Lucia (compiled through the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank); WTI crude is the benchmark used for correlations and the "what oil suggests" line (Saint Lucia's government uses WTI, not Brent). Brent is shown on the chart for reference. Oil data is the monthly average from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, converted to EC$ at the fixed rate of US$1 = EC$2.70.
How the oil comparison is calculated
Two ways to read the chart
Compare movement rebases every line to 100 at the start of the dates you pick, so you can compare how much each price has risen or fallen in percentage terms, whatever its unit. Real prices (EC$) shows the actual amounts you pay, with world oil on a second axis.
The "oil-tracking" line
In the movement view, a dotted line scores how closely each local price has moved with oil over the previous 12 months (a rolling correlation). It runs from -100 ('moves opposite to oil'), through 0 ('no clear link', what a price held flat by a cap looks like), up to +100 ('moves closely with oil').
The "what oil suggests" line
In the real-prices view, a faint line shows what each price would be if it still moved with oil the way it did in 2017-2022, before recent price-stabilisation measures. Over that window we measured the typical relationship between each local price and WTI crude one to three months earlier. Saint Lucia's regulated prices tend to lag the world market, and we carry that same fixed relationship forward. Brent is not used in this calculation. A price sitting below the line is lower than the past oil relationship implies (for example, held down by a cap or subsidy); above means it is higher than oil alone explains. That 2017-2022 relationship fits the data closely (correlation about 0.90 to 0.93) and is frozen. It is re-checked only as a deliberate step, never refitted automatically.
What this comparison does not capture
- Pump prices actually follow refined-fuel costs, which move a little more than crude oil, so crude here is a close stand-in, not the exact input.
- The "what oil suggests" line reflects oil only, not taxes, levies, shipping, or retailer margins.
- It is a simplified comparison, not a forecast and not an official price. The newest month may not have a world-oil figure yet.
- Electricity data begins June 2024; its fuel surcharge is the part of the bill tied to oil.