The data used here was aquired from the U.S Census Bureau. https://data.census.gov/table?q=gas+station&y=2021&n=447 https://data.census.gov/table?q=grocery+stores&t=Establishments&y=2021
What is the employment data for Gas stations and Grocery Stores? Who employs more people and who pays more? I see these two places all the time in the U.S and they seem fairly similiar. They both sell extremely needed goods with inelastic demand. The skill of labor for both seems failry the same. How similar are they?
First we should see how many stores exist for each establishment. Gas and food are both very necessary things especially in the U.S.
There are fewer grocery stores then there are gas stations. The difference isn't too big though. Meaning they are seen almost as much as each other in U.S society.
The average gas station I have witnessed is smaller in comparison to a grocery store. We can see this through looking at a few data points. These being the average amount of employees, average payroll, and average first quarter payroll of the stores.
We observe variations in the data, but the presence of outliers complicates our ability to gain a comprehensive understanding. While conducting an analysis to assess whether these outliers should be excluded, I found that these data points constitute more than 16% of the entire dataset. There didn't appear to be any inherent issues with the data itself. As a solution, I have revised the dataset to include these data points within the range of the boxplots.
When it comes to the sheer amount of money spent on employment overall. This mainly comes the top 50% of these points. In all 3 graphs gas stations and grocery stores have a very similiar spread in the bottom 50%. After this point though, grocery stores have a much wider range then gas stations.
The spread of the graphs seems proportional within the same establishments for each measurement. Meaning that pay per employees do not seem to change much between the 2 businesses. We can see this in a bar chart comparing the median pay.
Pay is higher at grocery stores per person. Which I would have assumed the opposite since what I have witnessed is more part time workers at grocery stores. Such as a lot of high schoolers working at cash registers after school. There is either more part time workers at gas stations then I thought, less part time workers at grocery stores, or both.
During testing, I found that there was significant evidence to say that pay is strongly related to the store. Meaning we can confidently say grocery stores pay their employees more.
We can break down pay even more by looking at a histogram of each establishments pay.