Ashley Douds

In her own words

Hi, I'm Ashley. I'm a geologist, and I run Smopper out of my kitchen.

The geology came first. I've spent more than 25 years in the subsurface, working conventional and unconventional plays across the Appalachian, Permian, and Rocky Mountain basins, the South Texas oil fields, and the Gulf of Mexico, plus international plays offshore Brazil and Nigeria. I got my BS and MS in Geology at West Virginia University, which is also where I fell for Appalachian stratigraphy. These days I'm a research geologist at the Indiana Geological and Water Survey, working on carbon sequestration, oil and gas, and critical minerals.

I know that sounds like it has nothing to do with the price of eggs. Stay with me. My whole career has been spent making a defensible picture out of data that refuses to agree with itself. Logs say one thing, cores say another, seismic says something else, and the interesting answer is usually sitting in the disagreement. Before you can compare any of it, you have to do the unglamorous work of putting it all on the same footing. That is most of the job, honestly.

Then one night I was standing in an aisle with a phone in one hand and two jars of the same thing in the other, and it hit me that I was doing the exact same work, just cheaper to be wrong about. One store prices per pound, the next per ounce. The package quietly went from sixteen ounces to nine. The shelf tag and the app disagree. The loyalty price only applies at a branch four miles away. Nobody normalizes any of it for you, so you either do the arithmetic standing there or you guess.

So I built the thing I wanted: one calm screen that tells you whether something is actually a deal, without opening five apps to find out. That is Smopper. I write Smopper Insights the same way I write anything else with my name on it. I will tell you what we have verified, what we are still checking, and what you should confirm in your own store, because prices are local and they move. I would rather be useful and honest about the edges than confident and wrong.

When I am not doing one of those two jobs I am usually outside, on skis when the snow cooperates, or back in the kitchen finding out whether the cheaper ingredient was worth it. Sometimes it is not. That is a post too.

If you shop these stores and something on the site looks off, tell me. I read all of it.

Ashley

Founder and editor. More about why I built this.