*Watch What Happens Live host Andy Cohen said his 23-year-old babysitter makes $30 an hour to watch his two kids, according to Page Six, and he "checked with friends" about the rate after his own showmate called it cheap.
The number first leaked on his own SiriusXM show, where co-host Jeff Lewis did the math out loud. "$30 an hour... that sounds cheap to me, especially from someone with your money," Lewis said, adding he'd have paid $100 for two hours and two kids. His own sitter gets $37. That's the celebrity HR cycle in one exchange: the rate comes out on air, the co-host with the bigger wallet calls it cheap, and the host is stuck defending it in front of the studio audience.
Cohen did not respond with a raise. He responded with a methodology. "I checked with friends," he said, and the rates were comparable. That is the most powerful sentence in the history of celebrity HR. The method is: ask your friends, a focus group made of men with comparable money and therefore comparable answers. No data, no market, just a group chat with a payroll tab. When pressed at the Broadcasting + Cable Hall of Fame Awards, he said he plans to "talk to more people about the going rate," which means the study is ongoing and the control group is other rich TV hosts.
The money was never the point. $70 for two hours and 15 minutes is nothing. The event was a multimillionaire doing math in public and defending it by asking the room. He admitted it, kind of: "I wasn't till we started talking about it on the radio. You're making me feel like one." The PR machine's answer to a bad number is to run a focus group and blame the radio. The babysitter did not get a raise. She got a case study.
YOUR TURN: Take the sitter job at Cohen money, or wait for the friend study to finish?
Comments (1)