units

One of the things I learned doing staff den for various SF conventions a decade or more ago is that the basic unit of food is the dollar. Individual types of food have native units but all of them convert to cash, and it avoids the unit ambiguity for things like juice concentrate or bread which have many common sizes. This is most true for Halloween candy -- and yet I have been tracking how much of this to buy based on number of trick-or-treaters, when I should have been tracking it by the dollar cost of candy consumed.

For the record, I spent a bit more than $30 this year, and $20 would probably have sufficed.