check my math?

[james_davis_nicoll]

There have been two parties of about 40 people each. I am going to assume consumption scales linearly with the number of people*. At a guess, the next three parties will look like this: 50 people, 80 people, 80 people for a total of 210 people, or about 2 1/2 times what we've already gone through. We went through six giant (650 gram, I think) bags of chips, and four regular bags of cheeZees so what we need is 12 – 15 big bags of chips and chip equivalents and 10 regular bags of CheeZees, which I think is the same as five big bags. So up to 17 big bags. Which, wow, seems like a lot.

(and then there are special cases like gummy worms, where a fair sized container disappeared in 15 minutes)

* I have been assured that it does not. Sadly, half the people I asked said consumption per person drops off as numbers rise and half said that consumption per person rose.

Comments

[vatine]

Consumption-per-person growth is not linear. It is also not smooth, there are step functions at (or rather around) certain group group sizes, where there's a dramatic change.

As to "below 1" (that is "shrinks") or above one ("grows"), it is heavily dependent on both macro-culture ("where are you", I do not expect these things to be the same in UK or Sweden, I suspect Canada is different again) and micro-culture ("office do", "theatre company", "IT gripe fest", ...)

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

It increases at the inverse of the exponential of the number of people attending, down to an absolute minimum of 1 serving per person at an infinite number of people.

[dsrtao]

Depends on time of day and nature of event and a bunch of things, but if you have a base case of 40 people and the events are similar, linear is the way to bet for extrapolations to 2-5x.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

If the implicit problem here is "How much should we buy?"---there is no downside to overbuying, as these things never go stale and can be stored in a locker for next year.

Time of day affects how much snacking people do at parties, also. Also, age of attendees.

[felila.livejournal.com]

My experience with cooking for meditation retreats is that fewer people mean a wider range of possible consumption (perhaps one participant will be a heavy eater) so you have to buy more just in case. With more people, consumption averages out and you can get away with budgeting slightly less per person.

[w. dow rieder (from livejournal.com)]

15.75 = 16 big bags of chips
10.5 regular bags of of cheeZees = 5.25 Large, rounding up to 6 at your conversions rates.

Someone... asked me to do a arithmetic word problem. In real life.

To all my students--see, it does happen! And if it were done wrong, there might not be the right amount of snacks.

(does happy dance)

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Unless your budget is tight, I'd go linear. At worst you have a few bags left over.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Unhelpfully, I'll wonder what the effect on consumption is from variety as well as quantity. So, for example, if X people consume Y bags of chips if you get a single type of chip, will they also consume Y bags of chips of you get Z different types?

[seawasp]

Also depends on age of participants as well as time of day. There's a reason teenagers are notorious for eating all the time, and a crowd that has 25% mid-teens to early 20s participants may well blow through far more bags than one with few or no such young people.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

If you're talking about the Friday late party, remember that it goes on past dawn, and people will be getting hungry again.

Actually, the Saturday strike party goes on all night too, as I recall.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Please excuse my ignorance, but what is VICE?