Yeah, Speaking of Math, Chuck...
One of the weirder blog posts about the Seattle Weekly "expose" of Real Change is over at Crosscut, courtesy of ex-Weeklyite Chuck Taylor. (We'd point you to the Metblogs recap but it's fatally flawed, in that it's missing one of the seminal posts on the subject, namely ours. So no can do. But here's Real Change's take on the kerfluffle-thus-far.)
Taylor's post is titled: "You don't have street cred if you can't do the math" and then adds, "Lost in Seattle Weekly's dustup with Real Change were a few easy-to-calculate facts." Oh good, a story problem:
Take the case of Seller Joe. Every week, he sells exactly 500 copies of Real Change for $1 each. He's in their elite 300 Club. ... Five hundred papers times 65 cents (his profit after buying the papers from Real Change) is $325. But since he gets to keep his same spot because of his success and sees the same people every week, let's allow for quite a few really nice folks over-paying and particularly good sales weeks and call it $400 a week profit.
Wait, "let's allow for quite a few really nice folks over-paying and particularly good sales weeks and call it $400 a week profit"? That bumps up this weekly take-home estimate by almost 20%. Where's the math on that again? Are we allowing for bad sales weeks, too?
Then Taylor multiplies that padded number by 52, because his unrepresentative case (300 Club and 600 Club members make up only 25% of Real Change vendors) also never gets sick, takes days off, has emergencies. That's a good trick, not getting sick, because "Joe" doesn't have health benefits and has to stand out in winter weather four months of the year, maybe 10 hours a day.
Taylor's point is that "Joe" (gifted with this 20% weekly bonus) might make $20,000 a year, when the Seattle P-I says the poverty level for a single person is $18,000. Now, the actual $325/week sales income would be just $17,000 -- presuming you agree that because you're poor you don't deserve or need time off. And do vendors need to pay self-employment tax? That's just over 15% on every dollar earned, starting with the very first one. But there we go with our "math" again.
Heck, here's some more: about 75% of Real Change vendors (again, working that amazing 52 weeks straight per year) earn less than $10,100 a year. That doesn't look like a lot to us. Chuck, does that look like a lot to you? Is that the "sort of factual information that can help people make up their own minds"? Man, this is just like Numb3rs!
