The Big Baguette Index
The United States has The Economist’s Big Mac Index to measure purchasing power through burgers, but France now has a more culturally appropriate metric. Enter the Baguette Index , a data project that tracks and analyzes the price of the baguette de tradition to map the true cost of living across l'Hexagone . How the Data Was Gathered To map out the geographic variations in the cost of France's most iconic staple, a conversational AI agent named 'Brigitte' was developed. Brigitte was employed to make a staggering 11,190 phone calls over a five-week campaign to reach 5,173 unique bakeries across 147 French municipalities. Despite getting hung up on over 1,400 times, the automated agent successfully engaged in 2,770 complete conversations. The developers were then able to validate and map 1,638 data points, creating the largest public spatial index of French bread prices ever compiled. Baguette Geography The data from The Baguette Index reveals that the cost of France’...
