Dan Kelly spent a decade globe-trotting from Siberia to Guam, recording grocery prices for cost of living data – now he’s turning his remarkable adventures into an Edinburgh Fringe comedy show
A man who spent a decade traveling the world’s supermarkets collecting prices of everyday items is telling the stories of his bizarre job. Despite how tedious the occupation appeared, Dan Kelly had to convince his friends he was not a spy.
From Guam to Siberia, his role brought him to destinations he’d never dreamed of visiting which made it hard to convince mates he was not working for MI5. He was tasked with tracking down the cost of daily necessities in the face of language barriers and sometimes suspicious shopkeepers.
After leaving his student days behind him in 2014, Dan secured a position with a tour operator but soon got fed up with the job. He found himself caught between the pressure of securing a “proper” career and the persistent feeling that he could be pursuing something more captivating.
In search of work, he began browsing job advertisements. “One week the job advert just popped up and the opening line of the job advert was ‘Could you find the price of an apple in Liberia?'” Dan, 38 from London, says.
“So, I clicked on it, found out more about it, and that’s how I started so sort of by chance really.”
No formal qualifications were needed and no clear career progression existed. At 23, Dan applied to become a data collector and, much to his amazement, was successful and given a comprehensive list of destinations that would map out the next six months of his life.
Before he realised it, he was globe-trotting with a checklist of 160 items to document in supermarkets, equipped with a Dictaphone, a spreadsheet, and a pile of plane tickets whisking him from one nation to another.
Initially, persuading people the role was genuine proved challenging. Mates and relatives were puzzled by the job description.
“One of the first things people would say was, ‘Are you a spy?'” Dan says. “And that’s because of the list of places In my first six months of doing it, I went to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Congo, and then Lebanon.”
While it might have been tempting to embrace the intrigue, Dan maintained there was nothing glamorous about it — he was simply documenting the cost of eggs across the globe.
The role, which he describes as a “treasure hunt”, was less spy thriller and more stamina challenge.
“You’d have two days per location. I’d arrive somewhere and have to go straight to supermarket number one,” he says. “Then I’ve got to do a second supermarket. Then I’ve got to go to the mall where the clothes shop is. And this was heavy, heavy travel, always on your feet, always roving around.
“But there was something, I don’t know, so satisfying about getting these prices and like ticking the list and being like, I’ve done that.”
The work was exhausting, yet compelling. Each destination brought its own obstacles, from navigating unknown cities to hunting down particular shops.
“It became a way to travel and explore places whilst having a bit of a purpose to it,” he says. His travels took him through supermarket aisles, shopping centres and high streets, giving him a unique insight into how people live around the world.
Every six months, a new itinerary would arrive: around 20 cities, each with its own tightly scheduled window. “For example, I’d get a list in like January and then by May I’d have had to have done two and a half weeks in India then I’d be going to China for three weeks but then I might go to Sweden for four days and then I’d come back and go to Uruguay for three days,” Dan explains.
It wasn’t just friends and family who were puzzled by what he was doing. Supermarket staff often viewed the man wandering the aisles with a Dictaphone with suspicion.
In countries where language posed a challenge, Dan frequently found himself relying on Google Translate to clarify that he wasn’t from a rival firm or conducting covert surveillance. “Their main concern was usually that I was from a competitor,” Dan said.
“And then if they wanted to know further, I would say, ‘Your supermarket is being used to benchmark the cost of living for expats travelling and living in this country.’
“Some countries proved more difficult than others. There was one in Pakistan which doesn’t have a single price label anywhere, which for a day of recording is just a nightmare,” he said, adding that he ended up taking over a hundred items to the till to scan and record.
In Iran, every price was written in Farsi, forcing him to learn the basic numbers.
Now retired from supermarket exploring, Dan has turned to comedy and is currently working on a show about his adventures to perform at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh this summer.