Griotta Research

Research and data

Original measurements of the moment between wanting something and buying it. Each study states what was measured, when and on how much, publishes its method and its data, and says what its numbers cannot show.

The Griotta Desire Index

A 100 g dark chocolate bar sells at 6.4× the benchmark value of its commodity inputs (range 4.8× to 13×). The other ranked objects: whole coffee beans 2.5×, ground coffee 2.4×.

A distance, not a profit margin: it pays for processing, packaging, freight, the shop and its people.

Measured: How far an everyday object's typical French shop price sits from the benchmark value of its commodity inputs: the Material Multiple.
Sample: 3 objects ranked; 13 more were specified and rejected by the method, each documented with its reason. 455 shop price observations across the ranked objects.
Observed: Shop prices observed in the 180 days to 22 September 2026; commodity benchmarks from the World Bank Pink Sheet published 2 September 2026; the euro reference rate of 22 September 2026.
Method: Method and sources
Data: Version 1.1 data, one row per object (CSV), under ODbL 1.0. Contains information from Open Food Facts Open Prices, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). The commodity columns use World Bank figures (CC BY 4.0).Commodity benchmarks, one row per Pink Sheet series (CSV), under CC BY 4.0. World Bank Commodity Price Data (The Pink Sheet), itself under CC BY 4.0, converted to euros per kilogram by Griotta. It contains no Open Prices data.
Last updated: 22 September 2026

NOW, the Commerce Acceleration Index

Promotions appeared on 169 of the 241 scanned pages (72 retailers); urgency claims on 20 (13 retailers).

Detector observed, independent human review pending. No composite score is issued.

Measured: Five forms of commerce pressure on retailer home, category and product pages: urgency, scarcity, promotion, shipping pressure and payment softening.
Sample: 114 US online retailers. 265 pages attempted, 241 open and scanned, across 96 retailers.
Observed: One pinned capture on 6 September 2026, 16:22 to 16:49 UTC.
Method: Methodology and limitations
Data: Observations, one row per page and dimension (CSV), under CC BY 4.0. Quoted retailer text shown on the receipts is not part of the dataset and is not covered by the licence.
Last updated: 22 September 2026

Citing and reusing

Cite the study page rather than this list. Each study gives a suggested citation, with its version and date.
Data Griotta owns is published under CC BY 4.0: reuse it freely, with attribution to Griotta and a link to the source page. A file built on someone else's database keeps that database's terms: the Desire Index's per-object data is under the ODbL 1.0, because its retail prices come from Open Food Facts Open Prices. Each file states its own licence.
Found an error? Write to support@griotta.com. Corrections are dated and published on the study page, as the Desire Index did in version 1.1.

For background, how buying became faster than deciding: three decades of checkout engineering, with sources.