I was in a Target the other day, and I noticed that a “party size” bag of Doritos was going for $6.39. Whoa, I thought. $6.39 for a bag of chips, and it isn’t even the biggest size, which would be “family size.” You get about 180 chips in the party size, more than three and a half cents a chip.
It got me to thinking about how expensive everything has gotten lately. How do people afford it?
I was still ruminating in this vein when I stumbled across a story showing that the minimum wage in Portland hit $15.45 an hour as of last week. Even if your tax burden is only 10 percent, that $15.45 scales down to $13.905. That’s not too many Doritos, I thought.
At that point, the lightbulb lit up over my head: I need to come up with a Time/Doritos Index that will track the true buying power of minimum wage workers. Messing around with some numbers, I have concluded that it takes such a worker 27 minutes and 1 second to earn enough to buy enough Doritos for a “party.”
Here’s how I get there. I averaged the prices of the party size bag at Wal-Mart, Amazon, Kroger, and Target. Wal-Mart has the best deal at $5.38, but Kroger wants $6.79, and so the average of the four is $6.2625. If you make $13.905 an hour after tax, you can buy 2.2204 bags an hour. To buy one bag, you need to work 27.022654 minutes.
And so there is this month’s Wage/Doritos Index, folks: 27 minutes and 1 second. Please send the Nobel committee a link.