“Honey, I shrunk the ice cream” or why data literacy can be taught in our daily lives
When talking about data literacy programs and why data matters in a business or enterprise context we often hear the following things:
• We need to get rid of gut feeling
• Decisions should be based on data
• People need to understand the data and their value
• and so on
But let’s face it: Most programs are not designed in a very entertaining or relevant manner.
We get big spreadsheets, dashboards with relevant sample data or very generic use cases. So what sticks often isn’t too much.
Luckily data is all around us and we have many points to make some decisions more data-informed.
With the summer coming to full swing in Germany many people enjoy their ice cream. And somehow a popular chocolate covered ice cream feels a little smaller than back in the day all while paying the same price.
Now several things might have happened:
1. Your memory idealized the size of the ice cream
2. You grew and the ice cream is smaller in relation to your hand
3. Some greedy corporate monkey shrunk your ice and thus indirectly increased the cost of your ice
Without having a look at the data, you would never know and just be left with a gut feeling and a small pack of ice cream.
If you take the look at the data you will recognize: Your gut feeling wasn’t wrong this time. Someone indeed took off 9% of the ice cream volume. Thus giving you a hidden an increase in cost.
This effect is not unknown. It’s called shrinkflation (a fusion of shrink and inflation). While keeping the retail price at the same level companies decrease package sizes to hide their raising prices.
Without data and seeing the relation between size and money, you would be left with a gut feeling.
With data you can tell the increase and base your buying decision on that.
That means:
• Not buy it at all
• Still buy and accept the raise
• Look for a different vendor
And now we can translate this to other topics e.g. in our jobs.
Your daily dose of data literacy.
Have you recognized any hidden raises recently?
Did you know about shrinkflation?
Sources for the ice cream:
More shrinkflation examples:
In the next episode of data literacy – Scaling like a champ with cheating on the Y-axis (in Germany known als the “Alexander Dobrinth Move”)
