They're watching!

One of my stories this past week was about a new Wal-Mart Supercenter opening in Wasilla. It's bringing competition to the area, which has been dominated by a store called Fred Meyer - a big chain, owned by Kroger, with a layout like a Supercenter.

For my story, I gathered prices at both stores for several different types of produce. Apples, grapes, avocados, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.

Just to clarify... I've never been great when it comes to MATH. Anyone who knows me can attest to that. But I attempted (in a hurry, nonetheless) to calculate the percentage difference of the prices of each item between Wal-Mart and Fred Meyer.

I typed up the prices and percentages and had the art/graphics department at KTUU create a nice flashy graphic with all the info. Two different people (one a producer) proofed my story before I voiced it and had Kris edit.

There was a problem with my Wal-Mart story.... the percentages were wrong. And none of us caught the mistakes. But guess who did? Our viewers. Below is one of a handful of comments we received via e-mail.

During Lori Tipton’s 10/31/07 piece on the new Wasilla Super Walmart, she shows a chart with price differences and percentages.... with inaccurate percentages.

The changes are 67%, 32%, and 28%, respectively. Someone on your staff should immediately have seen that the “Grapes” percent change was incorrect, as a 100% change would double the $1.79 Walmart price, and the Fred Meyer price doesn’t come close to this. Very sloppy.

Also, Ms. Tipton states that the Fred Meyer produce prices average 47% higher than Walmart. She could legitimately make such a statement only if she collected and averaged the prices of all the produce common to both stores on the day in which she conducted the survey. I doubt that she did this, and, given the above, whether she is capable of doing it accurately. Even if someone were to do these calculations, they would first have to determine how they would reconcile the relative values of items bought by the pound with those sold by the number. Given this, there could be many “average” values, depending upon the methodology.

I think that you owe Mr. Meyer an apology. For the record, I have no connection to either store or company, and I shop at both stores when I’m in town.

But KTUU’s carelessness on with this story has me wondering how careful it is with the rest of the information that they are putting out over the airwaves.

Robert Carlson
Bethel, Alaska

OUCH.

Ms. Tipton is working on an apology letter... *sigh*

This e-mail was passed around during our morning meeting yesterday morning, to which everyone laughed and said, This is why we are all reporters and not mathematicians. But it's like Mr. Carlson said... "Very sloppy." And THAT is inexcusable.