ABSTRACT
Imagine that you have tracked the number of visitors to your store over the course of the past year. If the store was open most days of the year, you have more than three hundred attendance figures, which can be difficult to understand and utilize on a singular basis. But if you calculate the average number of customers per day, you have a single number that represents those hundreds of individual attendance figures, and that average number is easier to understand than were all those individual data. You can also now use that average figure to calculate other useful statistics, such as the range of the number of customers above and below average; how this year’s average compared with previous years; projecting customer visits for the coming year; and scheduling staffing, merchandise orders, cash flow expectations, and many other figures. Keep in mind that there are entire courses and entire books about statistics, so what is covered in this chapter can only be considered a very basic introduction to the field.
