Made in America. Craved Everywhere Else.

It is one of our largest exports, a product made in America from start to finish and craved by businesses and consumers around the world. And the latest edition will be released in October. We speak, of course, about the $100 bill.

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it is finally ready to introduce a new design after nearly three years of delays because of printing problems and other issues.

You can see a picture here. Resist the urge to print copies in color.

It may seem odd that the world continues to crave paper. Americans are using fewer bills of all denominations. But as I wrote in 2011, “For two decades, since the fall of the Soviet Union, demand has exploded for the $100 bill, which is hoarded like gold in unstable places. Last year Treasury printed more $100 bills than dollar bills for the first time. There are now more than seven billion pictures of Benjamin Franklin in circulation â€" and the Federal Reserve’s best guess is that two-thirds are held by foreigners. American soldiers searching one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in 2003 found about $650 million in fresh $100 bills.”

This is great for the United States. “It’s like borrowing money from foreigners that most likely will never have to be paid back, at zero interest,” the economist Bruce Bartlett wrote earlier this month.

And the product cannot be made more cheaply in China, or anywhere else.

There is, however, a lively market in knock-offs.

The Future of Driving

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

Driverless vehicles would be a windfall for households and businesses that acquire them but would probably increase traffic and nationwide fuel usage.

Google and other innovators are working on vehicles that someday might drive themselves with little or no attention from human passengers. The vehicles of the future will have fast, observant computers that automatically communicate position and road conditions with other vehicles on the road.

Driverless vehicles are expected to help children, the blind, the elderly and others who currently cannot safely drive themselves. Helped by their huge amounts of data and computing power, driverless cars are also purported to reduce traffic congestion and nationwide fuel consumption by driving smarter.

But smarter driving will lead to more driving, because smarter driving reduces the cost per mile of vehicle usage. The end result of additional driving could be more traffic and more aggregate fuel consumption.

These days, a driver has three main costs of the trip to consider: fuel consumption, vehicle wear and tear, and time and attention devoted to driving that could be for something else. (Drivers also need to consider other costs of vehicle ownership, such as the purchase price and the cost of insuring the vehicle.)

Fuel and wear and tear cost roughly 50 cents a mile, which is why employers reimburse employees for job-related personal vehicle usage at about that rate. At an average speed of 30 miles an hour (including stops, traffic conditions and so on), each mile takes two minutes of driver time. For those who value their time at more than $15 an hour, the time cost of the trip exceeds the combined fuel and wear and tear costs.

Research has shown that cutting travel costs through reduced gas prices causes people to drive more, for example by eschewing carpools and public transportation. A driverless car should also cause people to use their vehicles for more miles, because they could use their time in the car to sleep, work, watch television, read a book and do other things they might normally do at home.

Households and business may also begin to use vehicles with no human passengers or drivers in order to move goods from one place to another and, by economizing on the human driver costs, they may want to move more goods than they do today.

As people take on additional activities in their personal vehicles, they may also demand larger vehicles that necessarily require more fuel per mile.

Before driverless cars are adopted, a number of hurdles must be cleared. Some refinements in vehicle technology need to be resolved; insurance companies and state regulators must also figure out liability issues.

Even if driverless vehicles led to more congestion and more aggregate fuel consumption, driverless vehicles would be a welcome technological advance, because the billions of hours that people already devote to driving could be put to alternative uses.

But expect new driving technologies to increase the number of vehicles on the road.

The Future of Driving

Casey B. Mulligan is an economics professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of “The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.”

Driverless vehicles would be a windfall for households and businesses that acquire them but would probably increase traffic and nationwide fuel usage.

Google and other innovators are working on vehicles that someday might drive themselves with little or no attention from human passengers. The vehicles of the future will have fast, observant computers that automatically communicate position and road conditions with other vehicles on the road.

Driverless vehicles are expected to help children, the blind, the elderly and others who currently cannot safely drive themselves. Helped by their huge amounts of data and computing power, driverless cars are also purported to reduce traffic congestion and nationwide fuel consumption by driving smarter.

But smarter driving will lead to more driving, because smarter driving reduces the cost per mile of vehicle usage. The end result of additional driving could be more traffic and more aggregate fuel consumption.

These days, a driver has three main costs of the trip to consider: fuel consumption, vehicle wear and tear, and time and attention devoted to driving that could be for something else. (Drivers also need to consider other costs of vehicle ownership, such as the purchase price and the cost of insuring the vehicle.)

Fuel and wear and tear cost roughly 50 cents a mile, which is why employers reimburse employees for job-related personal vehicle usage at about that rate. At an average speed of 30 miles an hour (including stops, traffic conditions and so on), each mile takes two minutes of driver time. For those who value their time at more than $15 an hour, the time cost of the trip exceeds the combined fuel and wear and tear costs.

Research has shown that cutting travel costs through reduced gas prices causes people to drive more, for example by eschewing carpools and public transportation. A driverless car should also cause people to use their vehicles for more miles, because they could use their time in the car to sleep, work, watch television, read a book and do other things they might normally do at home.

Households and business may also begin to use vehicles with no human passengers or drivers in order to move goods from one place to another and, by economizing on the human driver costs, they may want to move more goods than they do today.

As people take on additional activities in their personal vehicles, they may also demand larger vehicles that necessarily require more fuel per mile.

Before driverless cars are adopted, a number of hurdles must be cleared. Some refinements in vehicle technology need to be resolved; insurance companies and state regulators must also figure out liability issues.

Even if driverless vehicles led to more congestion and more aggregate fuel consumption, driverless vehicles would be a welcome technological advance, because the billions of hours that people already devote to driving could be put to alternative uses.

But expect new driving technologies to increase the number of vehicles on the road.

Naming the New Twitter-Induced Flash Crash

The Associated Press’s Twitter feed was hacked today, and the hacker tweeted a message saying the White House had been attacked. Rest assured, there was no attack, but traders freaked out long enough about the hoax to make the Dow do this:

So will this sharp plunge (and quick reversal) get a nifty nickname like the “flash crash” did? I nominated “Tweet Retreat” on Twitter, and got some of these other suggestions in response:

@crampell How about tweefall ? #APhack

â€" Raja Bose (@teestasdad) 23 Apr 13

 

@dandrezner @crampell Sub-tweet is already taken. How about #HashDrag? Twitter Jitter?

â€" Jason Warren (@lostinhistory) 23 Apr 13

@crampell The Terror Error

â€" Mike Johns (@mike_johns) 23 Apr 13

@crampell Tweet-Decked?

â€" Oliver Bell (@ojbell) 23 Apr 13

@lostinhistory @dandrezner @crampell My vote is #Twittermonium

â€" Timothy Aeppel (@TimAeppel) 23 Apr 13

What names do you suggest?

In New York City, Cheaper (and Later) Pedicures

I have written a column for The New York Times Magazine about the cost of living in New York, which is actually relatively cheap if you’re wealthy and have standard wealthy-person tastes. It was based largely on research by Jessie Handbury, an economics professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which looked at the groceries that rich versus poor people buy, and how much those different bundles of groceries cost in rich versus poor cities.

In a high-income city like New York, grocery costs are 20 percent lower for high-income people than they are in a low-income city like New Orleans (whereas costs are about 20 percent higher for low-income people in the rich city than the poor city). That’s because there’s a very high concentration of highly skilled people here, so there are a lot of vendors competing for the business of those high-income people, effectively lowering costs and increasing the variety of products that appeal to this consumer group.

Professor Handbury looked specifically at food, but she said that for most things you buy, there are probably positive externalities that come from living around a lot of people who have tastes similar to yours.

“The results are generalizable to other products that have increasing returns to scale and where we think there’s differentiated demand across income types,” she said. “That pretty much holds up, I think, up to housing. You don’t have increasing returns to scale with housing, because you have such an inelastic supply there.” (“Inelastic supply” means that supply can’t adjust easily in response to changes in price; I’ll have more about New York housing costs in a subsequent blog post.)

I was interested to see whether prices of other, relatively supply-elastic services that cater to high-income people are cheaper here than they are elsewhere. Getting local pricing data along these lines is difficult, though, since the usual cost-of-living measures are based on the basket of goods that the typical consumer purchases, not the high-income consumer.

Fortunately I came across Centzy, a company that is compiling pricing and hours data for local businesses as part of a search engine service.

Centzy’s co-founder and chief executive, Jay Shek, said that the company defined a taxonomy of businesses that they want to cover and the information they want to know about each. Then they purchased phone-book listings (just as companies like Yelp and Google do) for these businesses. At any given time Centzy employs 40 to 100 people, mostly in low-cost places like India and the Philippines, to cold-call companies and ask about pricing and availability for a standard menu of services. The listings data are imperfect; Mr. Shek says about 15 percent of listings the team dials each month are out of date, miscategorized or otherwise unreachable, and that a Centzy representative will generally call up to four times during standard business hours before giving up on a company’s existence. Because of errors in the listings data, it’s hard to know exactly what share of local businesses Centzy has data for. Mr. Shek notes, though, that they use the same methodology for every city, so it seems unlikely that teir numbers would show any bias toward any particular city.

Centzy currently has information on the prices and hours at 400,000 local businesses in the top 10 United States metropolitan areas, with better coverage for beauty services and spottier coverage for less-commodifiable services, like yoga classes (whose prices are hard to standardize, because sometimes yoga studios and gyms charge by the class, the monthly membership, or some other package deal). I asked Centzy to compile data for me on the prices and hours for some beauty services that probably disproportionately cater to high-end clients.

Here are the prices for manicures (just standard, regular manicures, not including acrylic or shellac) and pedicures in New York versus other cities:

City	Number of Manicure-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average Manicure Price	Number of Pedicure-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average Pedicure Price
Boston	55	$13.62	55	$27.96
Chicago	364	$13.39	361	$25.86
Dallas	211	$13.43	211	$22.89
Houston	635	$11.30	635	$19.90
Los Angeles	307	$11.23	307	$16.21
Miami	174	$11.57	174	$21.42
Philadelphia	279	$10.61	277	$21.72
San Francisco	231	$11.30	227	$20.24
Washington, D.C.	93	$14.13	93	$26.97
New York	818	$9.14	813	$19.22
Average Excluding New York		$12.29		$22.57

For these services, at least, the average price was cheaper in New York than in the other cities (although there was of course a range of prices within cities).

Another service I asked Centzy about, massages, showed New York prices to be about in line with those in other cities, and even a few cents more expensive. Based on a thoroughly nonscientific survey of my more spa-going friends, though, I am told that there is probably more heterogeneity in both quality and variety among massages than in manicures and pedicures. So it may be harder to compare the average price for this service across cities if the composition of the massages offered is different (which it probably is, given different tastes and income levels in each place).

City	Number of Massage-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average 60-Minute Massage Price
Boston	58	$90.19
Chicago	201	$80.43
Dallas	137	$75.15
Houston	312	$64.69
Los Angeles	269	$60.10
Miami	120	$79.01
Philadelphia	88	$72.24
San Francisco	303	$77.19
Washington, D.C.	70	$88.16
New York	592	$76.92
Average Excluding New York		$76.35

One way in which New York definitely seems to offer rich people a better deal on these services, though, is in hourly availability.

You know that whole “city that never sleeps” reputation? Well, it shows up at salons and spas. Here are the total average weekly hours for businesses in each of the top 10 cities that sell these services (and note that there is substantial overlap between businesses selling manicures and those selling pedicures, so the hours are pretty similar):

City	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling 60-Minute Massages	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling Manicures	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling Pedicures
Boston	68.29	66.94	66.94
Chicago	65.85	62.29	62.48
Dallas	68.57	63.60	63.60
Houston	67.82	63.19	63.19
Los Angeles	74.34	62.84	62.84
Miami	70.29	62.90	62.90
Philadelphia	63.69	61.23	61.19
San Francisco	70.10	63.65	63.81
Washington, D.C.	66.42	60.53	60.53
New York	74.55	71.29	71.30
Average Excluding New York	68.37	63.02	63.05

As you can see, salons and spas have much longer hours here. In New York, about one in 10 (10.5 percent) of salons will sell you a pedicure at 9 p.m., according to Centzy’s data; in the other cities, fewer than one in 100 salons will be open at that time (unweighted average of 0.5 percent).

Greater availability at more hours effectively lowers prices for the people who consume these services. That’s because economists don’t think about prices just as the sticker price of goods or services, but rather how consumers prefer an entire bundle of goods over another, based on what we observe about their purchasing choices. (Economists like to measure the cost of different things people consume in terms of price per util, an economic measure of happiness.)

Restaurants might be a bit more expensive here, but they offer more variety, are open much later, and nearly all of them deliver. And more highly skilled people consume those varied, late-night deliveries, which they could not get at any price in a lower-skill city like Detroit. Similarly, people in New York have the choice to get a pedicure at noon, but often enough they choose the 9 p.m. one â€" hence we assume they prefer it (maybe because they want to work late, get drinks with friends, or some other reason). Let’s say we moved a customer who usually gets her pedicures at 9 p.m. from New York to Houston, where just 0.2 percent of salons are open at 9 p.m. In her new locale, she wouldn’t be able to get her desired service at the time she wants it, even if she were willing to pay a lot more for it, since there aren’t currently enough customers like her in Houston to support staying open that late.

Those kinds of trade-offs in quality and availability represent costs to consumers that may not be obvious in just the sticker price of a good or service.

In New York City, Cheaper (and Later) Pedicures

I have written a column for The New York Times Magazine about the cost of living in New York, which is actually relatively cheap if you’re wealthy and have standard wealthy-person tastes. It was based largely on research by Jessie Handbury, an economics professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which looked at the groceries that rich versus poor people buy, and how much those different bundles of groceries cost in rich versus poor cities.

In a high-income city like New York, grocery costs are 20 percent lower for high-income people than they are in a low-income city like New Orleans (whereas costs are about 20 percent higher for low-income people in the rich city than the poor city). That’s because there’s a very high concentration of highly skilled people here, so there are a lot of vendors competing for the business of those high-income people, effectively lowering costs and increasing the variety of products that appeal to this consumer group.

Professor Handbury looked specifically at food, but she said that for most things you buy, there are probably positive externalities that come from living around a lot of people who have tastes similar to yours.

“The results are generalizable to other products that have increasing returns to scale and where we think there’s differentiated demand across income types,” she said. “That pretty much holds up, I think, up to housing. You don’t have increasing returns to scale with housing, because you have such an inelastic supply there.” (“Inelastic supply” means that supply can’t adjust easily in response to changes in price; I’ll have more about New York housing costs in a subsequent blog post.)

I was interested to see whether prices of other, relatively supply-elastic services that cater to high-income people are cheaper here than they are elsewhere. Getting local pricing data along these lines is difficult, though, since the usual cost-of-living measures are based on the basket of goods that the typical consumer purchases, not the high-income consumer.

Fortunately I came across Centzy, a company that is compiling pricing and hours data for local businesses as part of a search engine service.

Centzy’s co-founder and chief executive, Jay Shek, said that the company defined a taxonomy of businesses that they want to cover and the information they want to know about each. Then they purchased phone-book listings (just as companies like Yelp and Google do) for these businesses. At any given time Centzy employs 40 to 100 people, mostly in low-cost places like India and the Philippines, to cold-call companies and ask about pricing and availability for a standard menu of services. The listings data are imperfect; Mr. Shek says about 15 percent of listings the team dials each month are out of date, miscategorized or otherwise unreachable, and that a Centzy representative will generally call up to four times during standard business hours before giving up on a company’s existence. Because of errors in the listings data, it’s hard to know exactly what share of local businesses Centzy has data for. Mr. Shek notes, though, that they use the same methodology for every city, so it seems unlikely that teir numbers would show any bias toward any particular city.

Centzy currently has information on the prices and hours at 400,000 local businesses in the top 10 United States metropolitan areas, with better coverage for beauty services and spottier coverage for less-commodifiable services, like yoga classes (whose prices are hard to standardize, because sometimes yoga studios and gyms charge by the class, the monthly membership, or some other package deal). I asked Centzy to compile data for me on the prices and hours for some beauty services that probably disproportionately cater to high-end clients.

Here are the prices for manicures (just standard, regular manicures, not including acrylic or shellac) and pedicures in New York versus other cities:

City	Number of Manicure-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average Manicure Price	Number of Pedicure-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average Pedicure Price
Boston	55	$13.62	55	$27.96
Chicago	364	$13.39	361	$25.86
Dallas	211	$13.43	211	$22.89
Houston	635	$11.30	635	$19.90
Los Angeles	307	$11.23	307	$16.21
Miami	174	$11.57	174	$21.42
Philadelphia	279	$10.61	277	$21.72
San Francisco	231	$11.30	227	$20.24
Washington, D.C.	93	$14.13	93	$26.97
New York	818	$9.14	813	$19.22
Average Excluding New York		$12.29		$22.57

For these services, at least, the average price was cheaper in New York than in the other cities (although there was of course a range of prices within cities).

Another service I asked Centzy about, massages, showed New York prices to be about in line with those in other cities, and even a few cents more expensive. Based on a thoroughly nonscientific survey of my more spa-going friends, though, I am told that there is probably more heterogeneity in both quality and variety among massages than in manicures and pedicures. So it may be harder to compare the average price for this service across cities if the composition of the massages offered is different (which it probably is, given different tastes and income levels in each place).

City	Number of Massage-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average 60-Minute Massage Price
Boston	58	$90.19
Chicago	201	$80.43
Dallas	137	$75.15
Houston	312	$64.69
Los Angeles	269	$60.10
Miami	120	$79.01
Philadelphia	88	$72.24
San Francisco	303	$77.19
Washington, D.C.	70	$88.16
New York	592	$76.92
Average Excluding New York		$76.35

One way in which New York definitely seems to offer rich people a better deal on these services, though, is in hourly availability.

You know that whole “city that never sleeps” reputation? Well, it shows up at salons and spas. Here are the total average weekly hours for businesses in each of the top 10 cities that sell these services (and note that there is substantial overlap between businesses selling manicures and those selling pedicures, so the hours are pretty similar):

City	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling 60-Minute Massages	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling Manicures	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling Pedicures
Boston	68.29	66.94	66.94
Chicago	65.85	62.29	62.48
Dallas	68.57	63.60	63.60
Houston	67.82	63.19	63.19
Los Angeles	74.34	62.84	62.84
Miami	70.29	62.90	62.90
Philadelphia	63.69	61.23	61.19
San Francisco	70.10	63.65	63.81
Washington, D.C.	66.42	60.53	60.53
New York	74.55	71.29	71.30
Average Excluding New York	68.37	63.02	63.05

As you can see, salons and spas have much longer hours here. In New York, about one in 10 (10.5 percent) of salons will sell you a pedicure at 9 p.m., according to Centzy’s data; in the other cities, fewer than one in 100 salons will be open at that time (unweighted average of 0.5 percent).

Greater availability at more hours effectively lowers prices for the people who consume these services. That’s because economists don’t think about prices just as the sticker price of goods or services, but rather how consumers prefer an entire bundle of goods over another, based on what we observe about their purchasing choices. (Economists like to measure the cost of different things people consume in terms of price per util, an economic measure of happiness.)

Restaurants might be a bit more expensive here, but they offer more variety, are open much later, and nearly all of them deliver. And more highly skilled people consume those varied, late-night deliveries, which they could not get at any price in a lower-skill city like Detroit. Similarly, people in New York have the choice to get a pedicure at noon, but often enough they choose the 9 p.m. one â€" hence we assume they prefer it (maybe because they want to work late, get drinks with friends, or some other reason). Let’s say we moved a customer who usually gets her pedicures at 9 p.m. from New York to Houston, where just 0.2 percent of salons are open at 9 p.m. In her new locale, she wouldn’t be able to get her desired service at the time she wants it, even if she were willing to pay a lot more for it, since there aren’t currently enough customers like her in Houston to support staying open that late.

Those kinds of trade-offs in quality and availability represent costs to consumers that may not be obvious in just the sticker price of a good or service.

In New York City, Cheaper (and Later) Pedicures

I have written a column for The New York Times Magazine about the cost of living in New York, which is actually relatively cheap if you’re wealthy and have standard wealthy-person tastes. It was based largely on research by Jessie Handbury, an economics professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which looked at the groceries that rich versus poor people buy, and how much those different bundles of groceries cost in rich versus poor cities.

In a high-income city like New York, grocery costs are 20 percent lower for high-income people than they are in a low-income city like New Orleans (whereas costs are about 20 percent higher for low-income people in the rich city than the poor city). That’s because there’s a very high concentration of highly skilled people here, so there are a lot of vendors competing for the business of those high-income people, effectively lowering costs and increasing the variety of products that appeal to this consumer group.

Professor Handbury looked specifically at food, but she said that for most things you buy, there are probably positive externalities that come from living around a lot of people who have tastes similar to yours.

“The results are generalizable to other products that have increasing returns to scale and where we think there’s differentiated demand across income types,” she said. “That pretty much holds up, I think, up to housing. You don’t have increasing returns to scale with housing, because you have such an inelastic supply there.” (“Inelastic supply” means that supply can’t adjust easily in response to changes in price; I’ll have more about New York housing costs in a subsequent blog post.)

I was interested to see whether prices of other, relatively supply-elastic services that cater to high-income people are cheaper here than they are elsewhere. Getting local pricing data along these lines is difficult, though, since the usual cost-of-living measures are based on the basket of goods that the typical consumer purchases, not the high-income consumer.

Fortunately I came across Centzy, a company that is compiling pricing and hours data for local businesses as part of a search engine service.

Centzy’s co-founder and chief executive, Jay Shek, said that the company defined a taxonomy of businesses that they want to cover and the information they want to know about each. Then they purchased phone-book listings (just as companies like Yelp and Google do) for these businesses. At any given time Centzy employs 40 to 100 people, mostly in low-cost places like India and the Philippines, to cold-call companies and ask about pricing and availability for a standard menu of services. The listings data are imperfect; Mr. Shek says about 15 percent of listings the team dials each month are out of date, miscategorized or otherwise unreachable, and that a Centzy representative will generally call up to four times during standard business hours before giving up on a company’s existence. Because of errors in the listings data, it’s hard to know exactly what share of local businesses Centzy has data for. Mr. Shek notes, though, that they use the same methodology for every city, so it seems unlikely that teir numbers would show any bias toward any particular city.

Centzy currently has information on the prices and hours at 400,000 local businesses in the top 10 United States metropolitan areas, with better coverage for beauty services and spottier coverage for less-commodifiable services, like yoga classes (whose prices are hard to standardize, because sometimes yoga studios and gyms charge by the class, the monthly membership, or some other package deal). I asked Centzy to compile data for me on the prices and hours for some beauty services that probably disproportionately cater to high-end clients.

Here are the prices for manicures (just standard, regular manicures, not including acrylic or shellac) and pedicures in New York versus other cities:

City	Number of Manicure-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average Manicure Price	Number of Pedicure-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average Pedicure Price
Boston	55	$13.62	55	$27.96
Chicago	364	$13.39	361	$25.86
Dallas	211	$13.43	211	$22.89
Houston	635	$11.30	635	$19.90
Los Angeles	307	$11.23	307	$16.21
Miami	174	$11.57	174	$21.42
Philadelphia	279	$10.61	277	$21.72
San Francisco	231	$11.30	227	$20.24
Washington, D.C.	93	$14.13	93	$26.97
New York	818	$9.14	813	$19.22
Average Excluding New York		$12.29		$22.57

For these services, at least, the average price was cheaper in New York than in the other cities (although there was of course a range of prices within cities).

Another service I asked Centzy about, massages, showed New York prices to be about in line with those in other cities, and even a few cents more expensive. Based on a thoroughly nonscientific survey of my more spa-going friends, though, I am told that there is probably more heterogeneity in both quality and variety among massages than in manicures and pedicures. So it may be harder to compare the average price for this service across cities if the composition of the massages offered is different (which it probably is, given different tastes and income levels in each place).

City	Number of Massage-Selling Businesses in Sample	Average 60-Minute Massage Price
Boston	58	$90.19
Chicago	201	$80.43
Dallas	137	$75.15
Houston	312	$64.69
Los Angeles	269	$60.10
Miami	120	$79.01
Philadelphia	88	$72.24
San Francisco	303	$77.19
Washington, D.C.	70	$88.16
New York	592	$76.92
Average Excluding New York		$76.35

One way in which New York definitely seems to offer rich people a better deal on these services, though, is in hourly availability.

You know that whole “city that never sleeps” reputation? Well, it shows up at salons and spas. Here are the total average weekly hours for businesses in each of the top 10 cities that sell these services (and note that there is substantial overlap between businesses selling manicures and those selling pedicures, so the hours are pretty similar):

City	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling 60-Minute Massages	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling Manicures	Average Weekly Hours for Businesses Selling Pedicures
Boston	68.29	66.94	66.94
Chicago	65.85	62.29	62.48
Dallas	68.57	63.60	63.60
Houston	67.82	63.19	63.19
Los Angeles	74.34	62.84	62.84
Miami	70.29	62.90	62.90
Philadelphia	63.69	61.23	61.19
San Francisco	70.10	63.65	63.81
Washington, D.C.	66.42	60.53	60.53
New York	74.55	71.29	71.30
Average Excluding New York	68.37	63.02	63.05

As you can see, salons and spas have much longer hours here. In New York, about one in 10 (10.5 percent) of salons will sell you a pedicure at 9 p.m., according to Centzy’s data; in the other cities, fewer than one in 100 salons will be open at that time (unweighted average of 0.5 percent).

Greater availability at more hours effectively lowers prices for the people who consume these services. That’s because economists don’t think about prices just as the sticker price of goods or services, but rather how consumers prefer an entire bundle of goods over another, based on what we observe about their purchasing choices. (Economists like to measure the cost of different things people consume in terms of price per util, an economic measure of happiness.)

Restaurants might be a bit more expensive here, but they offer more variety, are open much later, and nearly all of them deliver. And more highly skilled people consume those varied, late-night deliveries, which they could not get at any price in a lower-skill city like Detroit. Similarly, people in New York have the choice to get a pedicure at noon, but often enough they choose the 9 p.m. one â€" hence we assume they prefer it (maybe because they want to work late, get drinks with friends, or some other reason). Let’s say we moved a customer who usually gets her pedicures at 9 p.m. from New York to Houston, where just 0.2 percent of salons are open at 9 p.m. In her new locale, she wouldn’t be able to get her desired service at the time she wants it, even if she were willing to pay a lot more for it, since there aren’t currently enough customers like her in Houston to support staying open that late.

Those kinds of trade-offs in quality and availability represent costs to consumers that may not be obvious in just the sticker price of a good or service.