Jon — who really should be blogging — passed along this Toronto Star article on the relative proportions of wine, beer, and spirits sold in Canada. It's pretty unremarkable news, but I thought that Jon's comments were worth posting:
"Canadians spent $638.60 per capita on alcoholic beverages in 2004-05"
Yikes! I bet it's higher than that when you consider the number of people who actually buy and consume the stuff, rather than using the whole population for the "per capita" amount.
Hmmm....
If you divide the $16.8 billion reported in the Star article by $638.60, you get a "population" of 26,307,548.
Looking at the StatsCan population numbers, if you add in the 15-19 group, you get a population of 26,585,000 — which is close to the number above, for estimate purposes.
That puts the potential alcohol buying population at 24,439,200.
How many of those folks are actually buying the stuff? Let's look at the number of people who report that they consume alcohol, and assume that these are the same people buying the stuff.
Average the years 1990-2003 from here and you get a figure of 62.3%. Which puts the alcohol purchasing population at about 15,225,622 (rounded up one to get rid of the decimal).
I work out the actual amount spent by each drinker to $1353.50.
I could be wrong, though. Probably am.
In another email, he also mentioned "The percentage of people who report consumption is probably off, too - those are US numbers. We might be higher here because of cold weather and bone crushing socialism."
Cross-posted to Ontario Wine Blog.
Posted by Nicholas at September 14, 2006 08:28 AMNote to readers Statistics on sales of alcoholic beverages by volume should not be equated with data on consumption. Sales volumes include only sales by liquor authorities and their agents, and sales by wineries and breweries and outlets that operate under license from the liquor authorities. Consumption of alcoholic beverages would include all these sales, plus homemade wine and beer, wine and beer manufactured through brew-on-premises operations, all sales in duty-free shops and any unrecorded transactions. Similarly, statistics on sales of alcoholic beverages by dollar value of sales should not be equated with consumer expenditures on alcoholic beverages. The sales data refer to the revenues received by liquor authorities, wineries and breweries and these revenues include sales to licensed establishments such as bars and restaurants. The sales data, therefore, do not reflect the total amount spent by consumers on alcoholic beverages since the prices paid in licensed establishments are greater than the price paid by those establishments to the liquor authorities. Per capita data are based on the population aged 15 and over."The sales data, therefore, do not reflect the total amount spent by consumers on alcoholic beverages." Hmm. You sure don't get that impression from the way the Toronto Daily Socialist reported it. Posted by: Jon at September 14, 2006 09:33 AM
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