Exploring Art 50: Food for thought.

Been at the doctor this week. A few hours of boredom meant that I did math. For fun.

I don't have a point to this, just some numbers I'd like to put out there in the universe.

Minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.
Full time work is 40 hours a week.
A full time worker on min wage makes $290 a week or roughly $1160 a month.

Suppose an artist makes prints and sells them for $10 a piece. In order to make $1160 a month, they will need to sell roughly 4 prints per day ($40 a day), or 29 per week ($290 a week), or approximately 116 prints a month.

With 12 months in the year, an artist would need to sell 1392 prints per year.

Now. If the artist is getting those prints for free, that would be okay. But let's assume that the artist didn't want to mark up very much, and so let's say the prints cost $5 each to make (just for the sake of easy math, that's including packaging, matting, and the print itself. That's not a real number, I just want something that breaks into percentages easily). That means 50% of everything sold doesn't go to your hourly wage, it goes to the cost of materials. So, you need to double all the math. Which means an artist needs to sell 8 $10 prints per day, 58 per week, 232 a month,  or 2,784 prints a year.

Of course if you're doing that, you won't have money for new things. You pay for the prints out of the sales, but we all know that minimum wage is below the poverty line right now. So buying art supplies for new paintings (unless you think you can sell 2,784 prints of one image every year) is going to need to come out of that money. Attending conventions, advertising, website space, art show space, *the cost of prints that don't sell and so don't earn their expense*, any business expenses need to come from those sales. A lot of artists I know tend to half their profits. Half goes back into the business, half goes to themselves for their minimum wage. So if you do that... then we need to do math again.

To make it simple, we'll cut off the money you're not taking home (since this is about making enough sales to make minimum wage). So if you have a $10 print, and  $5 in cost of making the prints, and you don't want to up your prices for business. So you do half of your profits to the business (that's $2.50), that means for every single print you sell, you are making $2.50.

Remember our weekly wage? $290 a week? In order to make $290 in a week of sales, you need to sell 116 prints a week. In order to make $1160 a month, you need to sell 464 prints a month. 12 months in a year, that's 5,568 prints per year at $10 a print in order to still make minimum wage.

Just throwing that out in the universe.