Service Extraordinaire: Are you Being Gouged?

I love Google mashup maps. This morning I found some that compare the cost of a head of lettuce, a quart of milk, and six-pack of beer around the five boroughs of Manhattan (and some neighboring locales). The purple lettuces in the picture above indicate heads of iceburg lettuce with a cost greater than $1.75, and the green ones indicate a price of $1.25 or less. The beer map is a bit more shocking.

It's something everybody knows about (the $2.80 box of Kashi at Trader Joes and the ludicrous $6 package of the same Kashi on Central Park South) but it's always interesting (and useful) to have all of that information in one place.

The Crowdsourcing project from which this map (and the others) came asked Brian Lehrer show watchers to find the local prices and upload them to the WNYC website. That's pretty awesome.