The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-01-12
s25o,ooo, 900 FOR CANDY.
This Is About the Amount Spent An.
 nualIy In the United States.
From the Charlotte News.

From the Charlotte News
 When we came to balance our house. hold accounts for 19O7,p said man who likes to keep track of his expenses, ''we found that we had spent for candy in the course of the year about s6O.
 There are five persons in our family, and so the candy expense to us in 1S0I was about SIP a head, which 1 guess is about what we usually spend for sweets annually. Now looked at by itself s12 doesn't seem like a great amount of
 money, only 23 cents weak for candy for each of us; but this year when figured up our candy bill I found myself
 wondering what that would come to if everybody in the country spent as much.
 Putting the population of the country,
 for the sake of easy figuring at 5000 0O0
 and at S12 a head should spend an-
 nually for candy $960,0OO,000. Of course
 knew we didn't spend that much, but
 that way of getting at it gave me for the
 first time some idea of the enormous ag-
 gregate of the amount we do spend an
 amount that even on the most moderate
 estimates turned out to be far grearer
 than 1 had ever dreamed.
 There are plenty of people in the country that spend in a year more than
 my family does for candy, but no doubt
 many more that spend less; so I just
 quartered the $12 a head and called 1t sS,
 which, not counting Sundays, would allow
 roughly speaking, for an expenditure for
 candy by every man, woman and child
 in the country of one cent a day, this
 seeming to be entirely reasonable; and
 figuring on that basis 1 got as the amount
 of money spent In the United States an-
 nually for candy $240,0O0,000 or to put it
 in round numbers, S250,00000. a figure that. great as it may seem, is probably ap- proximately correct, and that is indeed largely borne out by the statistics of candy production.
 By census taken in 1905 for the year ] 1904 the value of the eountry's manufac- | tured products of confectionery for that year was shown to be $S7, ,0S7, ,258, those ngures. however, being for the products l of manufacturing establishments con- ducted under what is known as the fac4 tory. system only, the product of ali the many smaller establishments, which was included in the census for 1900, being in 1904 omitted
 In printing the census bureaus fig- ures or the candy production of 1904 the Confectioner's Journal estimated the pro- duction of the small shops for that year
 at $29, 633, making the actual value of the confectionery production of the United States for 1904 $l16, 6,612, ,SS6. That, 1t will be borne in mind was in 1904. The factory candy production for 1904 showed an increase of more than 4s per cent over that of 1899, the year show- Ing in the 1900 census. The gross produc- ton of factories and smaller estabIish- ments has probably increased at a great
 CT ratio since 1904, but figuring it at the same ratio and so counting the increasa 1 Tor the last year of the period of threa | years from 1904 at three-ffths of the fac- tory increase from 1900 to 1904 inclusive We should have an increase in the three | year period of somewhere about 25 per
 cent, which would make the country's
 candy production for 1907 about s145, 76s,-
 lo1. It Is more likely that rather than
 under 1t was over that figure.
 This, of course, is only the value of
 the finished product, as 1t stands in fac- , tory or shop. To get at the amount fin- | ally paid for the candy by the consumer | must be added the various costs of mar I keting and the profit to the seller and | when To the original cost of production | we come to add this amount we find that | the people of this country are now pay- l Ing for candy annually about s25O O0O. .O00''