Demographics

One of the things I always liked about the USA Today newspaper is those little boxes in the corner which have a bar chart or percentage breakdowns or stuff like that on some random topic. I'm not sure why they appealed to me, it's not as if they usually had meaningful information. If I were to guess, it's just because I like numbers, and I have an easier time remembering number breakdowns rather than orderings on items. (For instance, a set of word-number pairs feels easier for me to remember compared to a list of just words)

So, when looking around a day or two ago, I stumbled on a post on Making Light which linked to a very interesting article in New York Magazine (italicized, cause that's how they did it on Making Light, and they must know the right way to do this sort of thing). The article is called "The Profit Calculator", and the best part of it is all the little graphs and bar charts that break down various statistics about each business. Some of the various entries are also quite interesting, I liked the restaurant ones especially to see how much they actually pay for ingredients compared to how much they charge, though I would have also liked to see the hidden costs for each ingredient rather than just the cost margin between materials and sell price - things like how much time does it take to prepare, how experienced a chef is needed to make that dish, that sort of thing.