Statistics can be used for benevolent purposes or for evil ones. Then there’s the middle ground, which is where this column resides. Once each month, I’ll suggest ways in which you can exploit data to improve your lot in everyday life. I won’t advocate that you do anything illegal or (in my opinion) immoral. But statistical analysis is being used, and not always to your benefit, by everyone from your cable company to your real estate broker. Consider this your chance to fight back.

Let’s start with that confounding multipiece puzzle of modern life: the local salad bar. Odds are that it’s a pretty bad deal. You plop a few items into a plastic box, and next thing you know you’re forking over 13 bucks. There’s got to be a better way.

So I visited a nearby Whole Foods on a recent weekday. As at other supermarkets and corporate cafeterias across the country, salad here is charged by the pound — $7.99 in this case.

Of course salad bars provide for a certain measure of convenience, but the ingredients I crosschecked were, on average, 70 percent more expensive at the salad bar than on the shelves. Cucumber, for instance, was just $1.49 per pound in the produce aisle. Other ingredients were more reasonably priced — and a few were actually cheaper at the salad-bar rate than anywhere else in the store, providing for “Moneyball”-like opportunities for arbitrage. So the fight against Big Salad Bar is winnable yet. Here are some suggestions to keep in mind:

1. The choice of lettuce is key. Avoid romaine ($3.06 per pound off the shelf) at all costs — and consider baby spinach ($6.67) and mesclun ($7.99) your friends. They’re good for you, too.