About the Saint Lucia Price Tracker

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 recorded 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.
• Recorded data is imported locally and QA-checked before it is published to this site.
• Every price shows its source market and observation date. Recorded from a public retail page. No endorsement or affiliation is implied.

What to keep in mind

• Prices may change at the source after being recorded. The price shown reflects the observation 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 recorded. The tracker does not claim full, daily, or nationwide coverage.

Corrections and editorial standards

Every figure published in an analysis report is computed from the same data files this site serves, never typed by hand. Before a report is approved, its headline numbers are locked to the export: the build compares them against the data and refuses to publish the page if they disagree. Interpretive wording is written and reviewed by a person.

That process catches figures that drift out of step with the data. It does not catch a wrong reading of a correct number, a mislabelled product, or a category that has been put in the wrong place - so if something looks wrong, please tell us.

• How to report an error. Email hello@soleytechnologies.com with the page address and the figure or product you are questioning. A screenshot or a link to the source page helps.
• What happens next. We check the claim against the published export and the observation it came from, and reply to tell you what we found, whether or not anything changes.
• How corrections appear. A corrected report is updated in place and the change is listed with its date in the report's own revisions list. Corrections are not made silently, and a page is not quietly deleted to resolve an error.
• How often reports appear. A report is published after an update is added to the site. Updates are irregular rather than on a fixed weekly schedule, so every report states the dates it covers instead of implying a routine cadence.

How this site is funded

The tracker is free to use. Hosting, the domain, and the time spent recording 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 data sources

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 currently the only grocery source; location details stay internal for auditability and are not a public branch selector.

Browse Categories or see current Data Sources.

What Insights measures, and what it does not

The Insights page reports how recorded prices have moved. Every figure on it is computed at page load from the same published data behind the rest of the site, and each one states the products it covers.

Those figures treat every product equally. They carry no household spending weights, cover only what one source market publishes, and compare the observation dates we happened to record. That makes them a description of this dataset, not a measure of the cost of living. They are not CPI, not an official inflation rate, and not a government statistic.

A fixed-composition essentials basket is the honest version of that question, and it needs a reviewer to choose its contents before it can mean anything. Until a basket version has been reviewed and approved, no such figure is published here at all.

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.

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