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A story in Sunday's business section mentioned a woman who said it was an outrage that her family of five spent $311.50 in a day at Disneyland. A Disney official replied that they were there for eight hours, and it costs $6.50 to see a movie that lasts just 90 minutes.
Disneyland works out to $7.79 per person per hour, whereas a first-run movie is $4.33. That's a novel way to judge entertainment values, so I looked at others.
A one-day lift ticket at Aspen costs $40. That's probably six hours of skiing, for $6.67 an hour, excluding meals, transportation, equipment and lodging -- all of which amount to substantially more than the lift ticket. You can't blame ski operators for raising prices. They're the ones with the attraction, yet it's the peripheral industries that get most of the money.
My calculations show that most entertainment runs between $5 and $10 an hour. A hard-back best seller might cost $25 and take three hours to read, for $8.33 an hour. A half-day raft trip is $25 for four hours, or $6.25. The average major-league baseball ticket is $11 for a two-hour game, or $5.50.
A four-hour band night at the saloon comes to $5.12 per hour ($20.50 total -- $2 cover, eight beers at $1.75, and $2.50 because the band keeps telling you not to forget those waitresses and bartenders, no matter how much they forget you).
If you're like me, you look for bargains. Cable TV costs $22 a month. The average is six hours a day with two people watching, which works out to six cents an hour. That's such a great deal that the cable monopolies will use it as an excuse to triple rates and point out that you're still paying only 18 cents an hour for the Slime Mutant Channel and the Compulsive Shoppers Network.
To consider nobler matters, a museum costs $2 and takes two hours, for $1 an hour. The Post costs 25 cents, and requires half an hour to consume, for 50 cents an hour.
Martha says that piano books are the best. Take a $10 book of 20 songs, each requiring two hours to learn. That's 40 hours of personal challenge, at only 25 cents an hour. Further, the worse you are at the piano, the longer it will take you to learn the songs, and thus the better the deal.
My nomination for the cheapest entertainment is a used paperback of War and Peace that cost $1.25 and took 12 hours to read, for 10 cents an hour.
I'm still working on the most expensive. My informal survey reveals that the average Coloradan has gained two hours of exquisite pleasure from watching Neil Bush, Ken Good and company squirm under press and congressional scrutiny. We'll each pay $2,000 for the S&L bailout, so there's $1,000 an hour -- pricey entertainment. However, the average American has devoted 20 seconds to the joy of reading George Bush's lips, and will pay $114.30 more in federal taxes this year, for $20,574 an hour. Disneyland seems quite realistic by comparison.
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