Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with demand

Lather over Lotion?

CollectiveMind — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:07:00 -0800

Why does Palmer's Olive Butter Formula Lotion vary so wildly in price? In looking for a hand lotion, I noticed that their new offering began showing up in Big Lots for $2.00 for a .60 oz tube, $2.50 for a 8.5 oz bottle and $3.00 for a 17 oz pump. Besides that not making any sense, it was on the shelves throughout last winter and spring at these prices, only to disappear for about a month with only the bottle returning at twice the price (which, BTW is the same price it was selling in the grocery stories). Then it disappeared for another month and now, all three are back at last year's prices. Understandably, it is flying off the shelves, again. But (1) Why the disparity in price vs. quantity, and (2) Why even in the discount stores, was the price raised and then reduced again? I'm wondering what kind of market or corporate forces might be at work?

What can I do with BA in communications?

AZNsupermarket — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:17:41 -0800

Hi, I'm sophomore college student thinking about majoring in communications. When I get out of college what can I expect when I graduate? What kind of jobs will be open? What kind of demand can I expect? What kind of salary can I expect? Should I think about going on after college for some sort of further education?

how to manufacture 1000+ units of new, custom fabric based product?

nolnar — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:19:44 -0800

I've made a new fabric product that I hope would sell 5000+ units. For viable efficiency I need to buy manufacturing of the product or its parts. I don't want to reveal my product idea, but let's use a SLR camera bag made in sturdy fabric as an example. My product has similar materials, size and complexity. How do I go from there? background: I lack previous experience from buying manufacturing of a product. (I also don't have business experience but I'll focus on that topic later so leave that for now)

questions:
(1) Are there companies with online services that take blueprints/prototypes/CAD-designs of a fabric camera bag type of product as input and output a number of units (100, 1000 ...) of either the completed product or parts for me to assemble?

(2) Are there for fabric camera bag type of product similar services to to print-on-demand book publishing or what http://www.cafepress.com/ et al offer? That is, I input the design and the company hosts my product page, handles the customers payments and manufactures and sends out the product. I get a portion of the money from each sale.

(3) Are there detailed product catalogs with generic standard parts to buy in bulk for this type of product? Something similar to the extremely detailed catalogs of electronic and mechanical components available from many companies. So for a fabric camera bag type of product there would be standard should straps, side pockets, plastic clip-on joints and so on in various shapes, sizes, colors and materials.

Note: I know that there are various craft communities/websites where custom fabric products can be made on demand from any design by hobbyist crafters, as discussed in this thread http://ask.metafilter.com/111371/How-can-I-design-and-make-a-custom-camera-bag . But that is not viable for the thousands of units in my example.

Print on Demand services with APIs?

steiny — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 06:05:33 -0800

Are there any print on demand services that offer APIs for large prints or small posters, instead of having to email requests manually, or manually fill in web forms again and again? I'm looking for something a bit like the Moo print API but for larger prints ie A4 (legal size) and up.

Ideally the service would be able to handle print runs ranging from 1 to 1000 prints or more, and would be able to bill weekly or monthly.

Please explain the economics of energy and oil.

F.Jasmine Addams — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:23:51 -0800

How do gas companies get away with raising prices so much when they are reporting such high profits? I just heard on the radio that Shell reported a 14% rise in profits over the last year, the largest increase in history for a US company. British gas here in the UK are raising prices by 35% (!), but they are reporting billions of pounds of profit - so much profit that the government are considering a windfall tax for British Gas, but is that something that is going to reduce that 35% increase? How do massive profits + massive price increases NOT equal profiteering?
I am obviously mostly ignorant about economics, but I would like to learn more, so any books/articles that will help me understand this would be appreciated in addition to your explanations

Where do I go to look up global commodity supplies?

onalark — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:19:15 -0800

How do I look up current global commodity supplies? Even better, is there somewhere I can compare global commodity prices versus their supply and consumption rates over an extended period? So we've been inundated with the 'big news' this week that commodity prices are shooting through the roof, with various theories for why this is so. One theory is that speculation and a large influx of money from investors wary of other markets is artificially driving prices up, with a counter-argument that supplies have been unable to keep up with increased demand. I know that things are undoubtedly more subtle than that, but I'm still interested in looking at some raw numbers. I have no idea how one would go about looking for this information, and a bit of googling has not lead very far.

The hourly demands of an IT Project Management job?

gttommy — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 07:42:32 -0800

The hourly demands of an IT Project Management job? Help me with my career planning! I think would like to eventually work in a role that offers high control. High difficulty or complexity is ok, however, it needs to be less than 40-50 hours per week.

I'm assuming any higher positions like business manager or CEO would be impossible. But what about a project manager? How unlikely is a 9am-5pm IT Project Management job?

I'm sure there is variation between different companies in the say way some companies expect a developer to work long hard hours especially nearing deadlines, while some believe in work/life balance and more than 40hrs leads to fatigued, inefficient programmers. Is project management varied in a similar way? If not, how many more hours are generally expected?

I'm assuming they are expected to be more flexible and put in more time, then say a developer, so that obviously means they are expected to work longer hours.

Your collective wisdom is appreciated. Feel free to make suggestions outside of the IT field.

Tricks of reading supply and demand graphs

dropkick — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 08:49:02 -0800

I'm having the darndest time reading and discerning supply and demand graphs in Microeconomics, and I'm looking for suggestions from econ whizzes on how to improve in this area. There is so much that can be read from a simple supply and demand graph: who is getting product and how much, who isn't, price ceilings and price floors etcetera etcetera. I want to get good at it, and I'm asking for any tricks in parsing all this information quickly and accurately. Where do I look first on the graph? What question do I ask first? What do you do to extract all that info from a few straight lines on a page?

Why does putting up a new building raise real estate prices in the surrounding buildings instead of lowering them?

Caviar — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 21:44:45 -0800

Why does putting up a new building raise real estate prices in the surrounding buildings instead of lowering them? (Specifically, with respect to NYC, but explanations based on other areas will do in a pinch.)

It seems that every time a new residential building goes up, rather than lower prices by feeding the demand with some extra supply, all of the prices in the surrounding area go up because this is evidence that the neighborhood is now "hot" (or "hotter"). New construction buildings in the area are pitched as positive selling points for existing apartments.

Prices are apparently very closely tied to what the purchasers think they'll be able to resell for, rather than what the apartments are "worth", but I don't really understand how this phenomenon works in terms of motivation and demand. Expected resale value is presumably an element of worth, but I'm interested in correlations beyond that observation, given that it's not actually possible to predict how the market is going to go when a person will decide to sell.

Is this characteristic of a bubble? Is there an area of economics that deals with this?

Do market principles work differently if a large portion of the available goods are being frequently resold, rather than consumed?

Are there other markets which follow this same pattern?

What is the marketing strategy of games consoles?

emptybowl — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 08:14:44 -0800

I don't know anything about business or whatever, so Sony's strategy for the PS2 makes no sense to me. My girlfriend wants to get me a PS2 for Christmas, but every place we've called has basically told us the same thing: everyone's sold out because Sony is shorting store's orders in order to drive up demand. They did pretty much the same thing a few years ago when the PS2 launched. It didn't make any sense to me then, and doesn't make any sense to me now. What kind of business sense does this make? What's the point of driving up demand for a product that they don't supply? Are they trying to set up sales beyond Christmas? But even then, don't they just risk people getting pissed off and something from their competitor? All that said, anyone know where we can buy one? ;)