Happy Valentine’s Day. In case you didn’t get any cards or gifts today, please know that Smartodds loves Statistics loves you.
Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to research some statistics about Valentine’s day, and found this article, from which I learned much more about the population of Britain than I was expecting to.
Here are some of the highlights:
- A significant number of people spend money for Valentine’s day on their pets. This number varies per generation, and is as high as 8.7% for millennials.
- A slightly smaller, but still significant, number of people spend money on themselves for Valentine’s. Again, this trend is most prevalent among millennials, and also more common for women than men.
- 36.2% of people get unwanted gifts most years.
- 19% of people plan to celebrate Valentine’s late in order to save money by buying cards and gifts once the prices have dropped.
I’m not sure which of these statistics I found to be the more shocking.
Most of the posts in this blog are about the way Statistics as a science can be used to investigate problems and interpret data. But sometimes, the statistics are fascinating in themselves, and don’t require any kind of mathematical sophistication to reveal the secrets that they contain.
Anyway, I have to run now to buy myself my girlfriend a gift…
Happy Valentine’s…
