IKEA sells a broad range of household products and offers a low-cost breakfast in its store restaurants to attract customers into the stores early in the day. Suppose you are the manager of a store like IKEA and are making a loss on the breakfasts. You need to know whether the breakfast attracts customers to shop for the more profitable household items, and you decide to calculate the correlation between the number of customers taking breakfast and the number buying household items. (You could get more accurate information by tracking all customers as they leave the breakfast using the store’s video surveillance system, but your head of security advises that this is unethical.) Analyze the following sample data that are collected during the course of one week:

a) What is the correlation coefficient over the whole week?

b) What is the correlation coefficient over the weekdays only?

c) What is the correlation coefficient on the weekend?

d) How realistic are the above correlation coefficients for analyzing whether the number of customers buying household items is related to the number taking breakfast?

e) If you want to extend this analysis with data covering several weeks, which correlations would you calculate?

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Number of Customers Number of Customers Day at Breakfast Buying Household Items Monday 73 54 Tuesday 52 45 Wednesday 56 26 Thursday 81 57 Friday 83 34 Saturday 297 285 Sunday 253 231