Halloween Keeps Psychics Afloat
US Halloween Spending vs US Psychic Services Industry Revenue
Halloween spending soared while psychic industry revenue soared alongside it. October is the psychic's Q4. Madame Zelda pays her mortgage with your pumpkin money.
“Without Halloween, 93% of crystal ball readers would be doing freelance accounting by November.”
— Prof. Ouija Balance-Sheet, Occult Economist
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of US Halloween Spending set against US Psychic Services Industry Revenue. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move in lockstep tightly enough to produce r ≈ 96% (positive). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.
Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.
Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.
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