units

[totient]

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.

Comments

[macgyvette.livejournal.com]

You have the most mathematically obsessed approach to Halloween of anyone I know.

process

[palmwiz.livejournal.com]

well, good management practice says to close the information loop. So I use this journal as a way to ensure that I don't miss any trick-or-treaters, nor run out of candy, while attempting to minimize the time I have to take off work (core hours here effectively run until 6) and the extra money I spend.

Re: process

[macgyvette.livejournal.com]

That is a fine, reasonable explanation of why, but I don't think it negates the original observation.

And in my house, extra candy is never considered a waste. :-)