How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

A. Short answer: A lot. Do you see the number of freaking windows in this area? The bird poop? If I have the monopoly on window washing, I sure as heck am going to charge Microsoft. A lot. Except they are in Bellevue and Redmond and that isn’t Seattle (yes, you residents of those places, that ain’t Seattle).

Clarification questions:

1. -     Clarify that is the city of Seattle
2. -    Everything made of glass is a window (exclude glasshouses)  

Approach:

-             Break out sources of windows

o   Residential buildings

o   Federal/state buildings (police stations, schools, hospitals

o   Private corporations

o   Restaurants / Bars (probably roll this into “private corporations”

 Areas (ignored here)

o   Downtown Seattle (more windows, way more windows)

§  More high-rises = more windows

o   Suburbs

Estimating Residential Window Count

Seattle population: 600,000

Population that owns/rents houses: 500,000 (excluding kids)

Number of houses ~250,000

Number of windows per house = 4

Number of windows = 1,000,000

Estimating Government Window Count

Say 1% of people are needed to support Seattle,

      Federal Employee Count = 5000

      Average employee count per building = 25 which means 200 buildings

      Averaging 10 windows per building, that’s 2000 windows

Estimating Private Corp Window Count

Assume 50% of Seattle’s population works in Seattle: 250,000

Assume another 50,000 people commute into Seattle (total people who work in Seattle = 300K)

Assume an average company employs 100

-    # companies would be 3000, we don’t have that many companies

Assume the average employee count is 500

-    # companies would be 600

Assuming number of windows per company = 50

Total number of windows for private companies = 30,000

So far, we have 1,000,000 + 2000 + 30,000 windows.

In the interests of calculations, let’s just round it 1M windows

Let’s say labor charge for cleaning windows is $20 per hour and a worker can clean 10 windows an hour. That means it’ll take 100,000 hours to clean all windows and that’s going to cost $2M.

Now this seems a bit high or low – depending on perspective

What can we adjust?

      # Windows

      # Hourly Rate

      Seasonal rates (go up when chilly, bird migration? Or no cleaning needed when it rains?)