He’s a mean one, Mr. Grinch, and he may be (metaphorically) lurking around your town this Christmas, if yours is a town where bosses lean toward chattel drivers, charitable causes get neglected, and gift-giving is on the stingy side.
GALLERY: Ranking the 30 Grinchiest Cities
To find America’s grinchiest cities, we took a broad look at how people choose to spend their money and time. To measure the gift-giving of each resident, we took into account retail spending data from Bundle.com, a database of spending data culled from government and private sources, and divided by each city’s annual wage (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), to see how many dollars were spent at retail stores during November and December 2009 per dollar earned last year. We also found the average contribution per dollar earned to charitable organizations for all households filing itemized tax returns, according to data from National Center for Charitable Statistics.
But we also wanted to know how generous residents are with their time. We looked at the volunteer rate stated by Volunteering in America. Finally, we looked at the average weekly hours worked in each city, also from the BLS. (After all, being forced to work longer hours is a holiday no-no from the days of Ebenzer Scrooge.) The gifting, donations, volunteerism and work hours were all weighed evenly.
