{"id":65821,"date":"2015-02-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=65821"},"modified":"2015-02-04T00:59:39","modified_gmt":"2015-02-04T05:59:39","slug":"spending-on-fat-tuesday-and-ash-wednesday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2015\/02\/18\/spending-on-fat-tuesday-and-ash-wednesday\/","title":{"rendered":"Spending on Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the first day of the Christian season of Lent, a period of voluntary self-denial that\u00a0is the excuse for the indulgence of Mardi Gras. Last year a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/squareup.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">credit card processing company<\/a>\u00a0traced spending in New Orleans on both Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. They found a spike in the days leading up to the big day (below) and then a crash the day after.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/02\/22.png\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-65822\" src=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/02\/22-500x358.png\" alt=\"2\" width=\"500\" height=\"358\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/02\/22-500x358.png 500w, https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/02\/22.png 620w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>According to Mark Waller at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nola.com\/business\/index.ssf\/2014\/03\/square_credit_card_payment_com.html\" target=\"_blank\">nola.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;people spent 30 percent more at restaurants in the weekend before Mardi Gras than they did in an average of the four previous weekends&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What were they buying? Indulgences: &#8220;duck fat fries, king cake burgers, and crab and crawfish mac and cheese.&#8221; Mmmmm. The week before they&#8217;d mostly bought lattes.<\/p>\n<p>Comparatively:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;restaurant, retail shops and other merchants logged about half the business on Ash Wednesday compared with the Wednesday before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What was the most popular food item that day? Soda.<\/p>\n<span class=\"ft_signature\"><em><a href=\"http:\/\/lisa-wade.com\/\">Lisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/American-Hookup-New-Culture-Campus\/dp\/039328509X?ie=UTF8&amp;*Version*=1&amp;*entries*=0\">American Hookup<\/a><em>, a book about college sexual culture; a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Gender-Interactions-Institutions-Lisa-Wade\/dp\/0393931072?ie=UTF8&amp;*Version*=1&amp;*entries*=0\">textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/lisa-wade.com\/intro\/\">Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a><em>.\u00a0You can follow her on <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lisawade\">Twitter<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/lisawadephd\/\">Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today is the first day of the Christian season of Lent, a period of voluntary self-denial that\u00a0is the excuse for the indulgence of Mardi Gras. Last year a\u00a0credit card processing company\u00a0traced spending in New Orleans on both Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. They found a spike in the days leading up to the big day [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":65822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,2124,254,42],"class_list":["post-65821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-foodagriculture","tag-holidays","tag-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2015\/02\/22.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65821"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65824,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65821\/revisions\/65824"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}