Mint Data aims to be a real-time economic index where consumers can search to discover what their peers are spending and compare their own behaviors against national or regional averages.
The tool dissects spending by retailer, category and region, and it highlights spending data by average price or popularity, where popularity is defined by the number of transactions per month.
In San Francisco, for instance, the average purchase price for a restaurant expense is $35.74, with the average monthly expense totaling $294.69 per person. Users can also drill down to look at the most popular restaurants and the average purchase price at those places -- La Boulange with an $11.13 average expenditure ranks first in San Francisco.
With Mint Data, what we're looking at is essentially a slick consumer-friendly user interface built on top of Mint's purchase database that encompasses data from more than 4 million users. Mint Data may or may not be a scientific representation of the country's spending habits, but with its large user base, there's certainly a wealth of information that packs meaningful insight in the aggregate about consumer spending.
