Bill Guerra spent 17 years as a registered nurse in the Las Vegas Valley before he found his real passion, outside the hospital and inside the grocery store.
When he started Grocery411.com, a site aimed at helping Las Vegas shoppers locate the biggest bang for their food budget buck, Guerra found the transition from nursing to scouring grocery store circulars an easy one.
“I just love caring for people,” Guerra said. “When I started with Grocery411, it was the same (feeling).”
Bill Guerra, founder of Grocery 411, demonstrates the app in a grocery store in Las Vegas, Nevada on December 22, 2014.
Before he began developing the website in 2009, Guerra visited droves of grocery stores armed with his own shopping list, searching the aisles for the best deals and comparing price tags as he checked items off his list.
He found chicken breast at one store for $5.49 per pound and at another store for $1.49. He wondered what shopping must be like for low-income families who don’t have the time to shop around.
“If that’s important to me,” he said, “isn’t that important to the people who don’t have a career, who can’t make ends meet, who have children?”
Over the next four years, Guerra spent thousands of dollars of his own money and countless hours learning how to build an easy-to-navigate website for the average smartphone user.
With the help of a business partner, Guerra finally released the website in 2013. After offering a free trial period, Guerra began charging a $6.95 monthly membership fee, but eventually dropped the price to $2.99 per month after the number of memberships dropped.
Log onto the Grocery411.com and you can search for how much specific items cost at various stores around the valley, including Smith’s, Cardena’s, Buy Low, Walmart and Vons. Type in “avocados,” for instance, and you might find a deal at Mariana’s for 20 cents a piece. While those are only about half the size of the avocados you’d find at Smith’s, they’re still significantly cheaper by weight, Guerra’s research found.
If he had it his way, Guerra said, he would offer the data he compiles on Grocery411.com for free. As it stands, Guerra makes little to no money running the site.
“The goal would be to give it to them free, but until we can get major investors interested, it’s a paid membership,” Guerra said.
Altogether, Guerra and his assistant gather data for more than 800 items.
“By hand,” Guerra said. “It’s crazy.”
Every week, the two-man Grocery411 team searches through 25 grocery store flyers and websites. They then log the prices in a spreadsheet, clean the data and produce a newsletter for Grocery411.com members.
On average, Guerra estimates that using Grocery411.com saves individual users around $75 per month.
Going forward, he hopes to expand the site and offer even more data to customers.
“Our goal is to get some backers, fine tune and see where we can take it,” Guerra said.