You can buy 200 pieces of Hershey’s candy for $27.66 on Amazon, my source for prices on basically everything. This means that $1 could buy about 7.2 candies, however, because you cannot have a portion of a candy (well you can, but if someone gives you half an unsealed candy bar, I wouldn’t advise eating it.) so we’ll say that the cost is $1 per 7 candies.

Now, how long does it take to go house to house? I don’t know definitely because I don’t have all that much experience with it, but in a suburban area, 2 minutes per house seems reasonable. Now we know that in 1hr a small group of people can visit 30 houses.

The final bit of information we need is how much candy each house gives out. My house rules are to give two (2) candies to each person, but some houses use the simpler one (1) candy per person system. Because I didn’t think to go around my neighborhood and poll every house, I’ll just say each house gives an average of 1.5 candies (I should probably not use a decimal, as I just said that you can’t have less than a whole candy, but I hate when rounding and significant figures make apparently drastic changes.).

Ok, let’s do the math now. 1.5 candies per house and 30 houses per hour. That means that in a hour each person can get 45 candies, or about $6.43 worth of candy. That’s below the minimum wage in the U.S.

Also, to get 200 candies, someone would have to trick-or-treat for 4.4… hours. In this time, someone working at only $10 and hour could have earned $44.44, enough to buy over 300 candies. But that’s to be expected—I mean, working is going to get you more than playing, right? Well, yes, but people need to socialize with people (ideally friends) to maintain sanity, and that pleasure time is generally spent while not working; however trick-or-treaters generally go out with friends.

So, by trick-or-treating for 4.4 hours, you earn $27.66 while simultaneously spending time with people you enjoy being around, whereas if you worked, you could earn over $44.44, or $44.44 worth of candy, but to gain that 4 hours of social time, you would have to spend 4 hours with no pay. Then you would be spending 8.8 hours (4.4 working, 4.4 socializing) for the same $44.44+, leaving you at a pay of $5 an hour, which is significantly worse.

Anyway, for some reason I wanted to write this, whether it was in an attempt to convince myself I didn’t waste my night, or if I just like nit-picky details, who knows. Either way, it seems like trick or treating is the way to go as long as you can (assuming it doesn’t clash with other things). And, partly because my mom will be mad if I stay up later, and partly because this is already way to long and slow going of a post, I will end.