Waterloo's Plaza
11 Dec 2008
I eat out a lot when I'm on campus. So I was interested in knowing which places I spend the most on average per month. I exported my monthly bank statements as CSV which I imported into Excel. I then used the "Subtotals" feature under the "Data" context menu to figure out totals for each eatery. I then divided each total by 18 to figure out the average per month. My bank, TD Canada Trust, keeps statements for up to 18 months. With a bit of help from my dad, I figured out how to gather all these subtotals in a separate sheet which I plotted using a column chart.
Some things to note about the data:
- I might have gotten a cashback after eating at some restaurants. This skews the data point.
- I might have paid by cash at some restaurants at certain times. This would be a missing data point.
- I might have had someone treat me. This would also count as missing data.
- I might have paid for someone else because they forgot their wallet, and have them pay me back by cash later.
- Mr. Sushi is not on the list since they only accept cash. I don't eat there very frequently anyway, so it should be okay.
- Golden Mango accepted only cash for the longest time until this term when they finally managed to fix their debit/credit machine. This definitely screws up the numbers for Golden Mango.
- I eat on campus as well (SLC, DC, and SCH). I use my watcard at these places, so the data does not take into account these places.
And here I present the top 13 (click on image for larger version):
Conclusions:
- So it looks like my favorite places in the UW Plaza are Subway, Phat Cat, Kismet, Pita Factory, and Al-Madina.
- I spend 8.5% of all my food money at Subway.
- Just Subway, Kismet and Al Madina's account for about 20% of my total food expenses.
- The fact that I spend almost $40 bucks a month at Subway (and not Harvey's) is reassuring — at least I'm eating healthy!
