San Miguel Light as an economic indicator

Some people watch the price of crude oil, gas, diesel, rice, dollar, eggs, sardines, chicken, the stock exchange, unemployment rate, inflation, etc., etc. as an economic indicator of how things have changed so that they can adjust appropriately.

Me, I simply watch the price of beer.

Taking a quick survey of the bars in Dagupan City (courtesy of the powers of my old N70), I came out with this list tonight (Note: for this purpose, we shall define beer to be San Miguel Light beer):


Mouse House - P35
Quattro - P40
Hall of Fame - P45
Music WareHouse - P45
Diner's - P45
Joshua Tree - P49
Shinjuku - P60
Disc Capsule - P65
808 - P70

While I still have a few bars/cafes not on my list yet, I can conclude a few things and derive the following:

Mean Price of Beer - P51.56
Median Price of Beer - P45.00
Mode Price of Beer - P45.00

For mortals who puke at the sight of complicated numbers with weird operations and labels, let me translate:

Mean is the your usual average, computed the usual way (total divided by the number of values), median is the middle value (values arranged from lowest to highest or vice-versa) and mode is the value that appears most often. In this case, (pun intended) the median and mode have the same values.

If you think this is complicated stuff for illustrating my choice of an economic indicator, you should figure out the scoring system of say gymnastics or diving in the Olympics starting Friday. Before computing for the final score among a panel of judges, the lowest and highest scores are first stripped out, averaged, then multiplied by the degree of difficulty of the routine.

Beer becomes lovelier after this.

Anyway, if you can still remember how much beer cost a year ago, I'd say the average beer was P40, about P10 lower compared today. If THAT doesn't indicate something in the economics of your current paycheck, then lucky for you. It's either your boss have appreciated the intricacies of this economic indicator and have adjusted your paycheck appropriately or your boss have deppreciated you, simply.

In addition to beer being a valid economic indicator (I assumed you have agreed with me since you have followed this spirited discussion up to this point) don't you know that just by knowing the price of beer in a particular place, one can speculate with precision what kind of crowd a place have more accurately than forecasting the forex for the next day?

Take the case of a P35 to P45 a bottle range. The crowd for sure you'll find in these bars that have this price range are college kids. They'll probably buy a bottle and sit it out for an hour or more, not even caring to look at the pulutan section of the menu.

For crowds of the P60 to P70 a bottle range, expect a high profile crowd in the working class, from the yuppies to the executives, from the konsehal to the congressman. (Of course, beer for the female sex in a majority of these places have a much higher price range for reasons I cannot comprehend.)

So next time the big three in the oil industry announces another oil hike, don't get affected. Get out, hit the bars and monitor the price of your beer instead. The higher crude oil gets, the more reason you should enjoy your beer. Why, because even if beer is a valid economic indicator, the price of beer is not directly proportional to the increase of the price of crude oil. Rather, the price of beer is inversely proportional to the price of crude oil because beer is now actually cheaper than the price of diesel and gas, by-products of crude oil.

Cheers.