Because People Will Pay

I have always been really cost conscious. Some people call this "cheap," but I'll just say that I have always paid close attention to prices.

From a young age, I always asked my dad why things were priced so high? He always said, "because people will pay."

I don't need this 50,000 euro degree!!! That's what we're learning about in school. In our Strategy class, we learned about how for an item there is a cost, and then (hopefully) above that is the price, and then above that is the willingness to pay. Apparently there is not a direct relationship between willingness to pay and price, but it's definitely closely related, and my dad taught me this when I was really young. Way to go, dad! The only difference is that it seems that "they" could actually charge higher, if they're actually charging what people will pay. But then we go into supply meeting demand and micro economics, and that was last period, so I won't go there.

In other classes...Operations, for example, we have been learning about how processes work inside a factory. We have learned about bottlenecks and capacity and pooling (so you have multiple people working on the same project rather than spreading one person's time out among many things). And today, we took a field trip to the Tiger Brewery. We got to see the bottleneck (which is apparently the filler, because it can only move SO fast), and we saw all of the processes and how it all works. Then we had free flow beer for a while. Pretty cool.