When you read a headline such as ”Workers fork out £2,000 a year on lunch and snacks” (Daily Express, today) you can be pretty sure that our old friends 72 Point (Straight Statistics passim) have been at it again.
 
This time Superdrug was the willing client of a survey that got its name in the Express, the Daily Mail, the Daily Record, the Daily Star, and The Sun.
 
But for the life of me, I can’t see how 72 Point came by its central claim of £2,000 a year for the average British worker. What its press release actually says is: “Despite the recession, a third of Brits still spend around £4 a day - or £986.40 a year - on sandwiches, salads, baguettes and soup. On top of that they will also shell out £1.33 a day on snacks between meals, adding up to £6.65 a week or £319.20 a year.”
 
So that’s a third of workers spending £1,305.60 a year – the rest, presumably, less. In addition, we’re told that a tenth of workers buy breakfast out as well as lunch, adding £674.40 a year to their outgoings. Add these two together (assuming generously that the lunchers and the breakfasters belong in the same group) and you get one in ten workers spending £1,980 a year. That's nearly £2,000.
 
Somehow that then becomes the average for all workers. And all the papers listed above swallow it like a soggy sandwich. They should be ashamed of themselves. Doesn’t anybody read press releases before cutting and pasting them? Can’t they add?
 
Don’t trouble to answer those questions. They’re rhetorical.