tandfonline.com – Café Data 2.0: New Data From a New and Improved Café

ABSTRACT

In this article, we revisit the café story first introduced in 2011. Recent data from this café run by business students at a Midwestern public university are explored and analyzed. The data were collected using a point-of-sale system over a 3-month period during the spring semester of 2015. These data can be used in introductory statistics courses to illustrate the use of time series and forecasting, applications of data mining and visualization, as well as sampling, confidence intervals, and inference using ANOVA and chi-square tests for independence. Since the data pertain to a student-run business, we believe that statistics students, especially those in business disciplines, will find the data’s context to be relevant and interesting. In addition to the technical exercises, we provide background and context for several managerial issues that these data can be used to address, thus emphasizing the importance of data-driven decision making.