Cost of Living comparison for many cities

Question

I have an excel file with about 40 cities listed. I would like to compare the cost of living for each one. I have seen the sample "relocation calculator" given by the input:

WolframAlpha["moving from St Louis to San Francisco salary $42,500", 
 IncludePods -> "Input", AppearanceElements -> {"Pods"}, 
 TimeConstraint -> {30, Automatic, Automatic, Automatic}, 
 PodStates -> {"PriceComparisons__Show prices", 
   "EquivalentSalary__Show history"}]

This output is nice but I would really like to have this for several cities and the output be formatted in rows and columns for my spreadsheet.

I have no idea how to go about this...

Answer 1

As an example

cities = EntityValue[CountryData["UnitedStates", "LargestCities"], 
   "Name"];
first = First@cities
rest = Rest@cities;
data = WolframAlpha[
     StringJoin["moving from ", first, " to ", #, 
      " $42,500"], {{"PriceComparisons", 1}, "ComputableData"}, 
     PodStates -> {"PriceComparisons__Show prices", 
       "PriceComparisons__More"}] & /@ Take[rest, 5];
goodies = data[[1, 2 ;;, 1]];
TableForm[Transpose@Join[{data[[1, 2 ;;, 2]]}, data[[All, 2 ;;, 3]]], 
 TableHeadings -> {goodies, Take[cities, 6]}]