Houston’s No. 1 Halloween candy is ... Milk Duds?
The number of surveys, studies and press releases marketed as scientific dives into data that we receive here at the Houston Chronicle each day is staggering. And some of them are laughable. But this one? This one has gone too far.
The email showed up in my inbox recently, a bright and cheery declaration in its very first paragraph:
“The most popular Halloween candy in Houston is Milk Duds!”
New York gets M&M’s. Chicago gets Kit Kats. Phoenix gets Reese’s. And this? This is the level of disrespect we get? An endorsement of the tiny, bloblike filling robbers that your kids leave at the bottom of their loot bag after rifling through for all the good stuff ? How did we get here?
Well, pseudoscience, for one. The “study” authors report that using the Google AdWords platform, they “analyzed search volume trends for more than 100 different types of candy, over the period of September 2018 to October 2018 in all 50 states and in the 20 largest cities in the country.”
The only sound theory as to why Milk Duds would have been at the top of Houstonians’ Google habits is that they’d forgotten what they are and needed a search engine to remind them. Though Texas as a whole was found to favor M&M’s, our fair city was surely the victim of some sort of statistical anomaly or full-fledged Google fraud.
There is hope though. To ensure we are better treated in next year’s study, go forth and Google the good stuff. Kit Kats! Snickers! Junior Mints! Literally anything else.
We will rebuild.