Introduction

Three California cities including San Francisco, Oakland, and Albany, were under debate last year, on whether to pass a penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks (a fact update, in November, 2016, the Proposition passed in all three cities). The tax would have impacted various sectors including consumers (higher income vs. lower income), beverage companies, and the government. Below visualization was done by The Pew Charitable Trusts studying the percentage movement on sugary drinks and water in Berkeley (where soda tax was imposed previously) versus SF/Oakland.

Impression

One of the biggest principles that I have learned thus far in the class is there is always an argument of what you want to achieve with the data, and with different audiences, you have different objectives.

I believe this organization (The Pew Charitable Trusts) had a stance of pro-soda tax. Knowing the organization’s perspective on this issue, this visualization is fairly effective on conveying its believe. The chart clearly shown that in the five months after Berkeley passed the soda tax, sales of sugary drinks decreased when compared to the same time previous year. The only drink experiencing growth in sales is water.

Improvement

In my opinion, this graph conveys effectively in general. However, we can incorporate other aspects of the data set to target the needs of these two groups: the beverage companies and the government.

Beverage Companies:

In this article, it pointed out the increased on soda tax would impact more on lower income households because price tends to be the deciding factor on which product to buy. As a matter of fact, Berkeley saw 21% drop in sugary drink consumption in the month after the tax was implemented.

Another concept we learned from the class was it does not have to always be 0 or 1 (e.g. global warming or not, to pass the soda tax proposition or not). In this case, beverage companies could not only focus on opposing the proposition, but to think how to lose the least amount over this proposition.

From Berkeley’s stats, we know lower-income households consumption might decrease significantly after the soda tax. I would revise the graph and analyze data from each store and identify data locate in lower income neighborhood. We can then compare the historically sales in those stores and come up with strategies accordingly.

Government:

The purpose of the tax was to increase government income. However, with people shifting to buying water (no tax), the government might not get much out of this proposition. Therefore, for the government, the analysis could be a prediction of SF/Oakland’s tax using Berkeley’s historic performance as a baseline.

References

http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/10/17/sparring-over-soda-tax-cities-set-referendums

https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Soda_and_Sugary_Beverages_Tax,_Proposition_V_(November_2016)