The Effect of Higher Wages

How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? It Paid It's People More

Shopper complained about dirty bathrooms, empty shelves, endless checkout lines, and how employees were virtually impossible to find. In fact only sixteen percent of stores met it's customer service goals. Stores open for at least a year saw their sales fall for five straight quarters. That's longer than a basketball game! The article didn't actually say that, I just thought of that horrible pun. And Walmart has notoriously been known for treating employee pay as a cost to be minimized. So executives pondered that perhaps paying their workers lower wages was in fact the cause of their depression in profit. And so they sketched out a plan in early 2015 to increase both wages and training. And by early 2016, the proportion of stores hitting the target customer service mark rose to seventy five percent, and sales have been starting to rise again. 

The article was written by Neil Irwin, October 15th, 2016, and was published by the New York Times. 

The purpose of this article was to relay a new form of business strategy, and to advertise how this business strategy provided a positive effect on the economy. I feel as though it is intended to sort of influence other business owners to consider increasing the pay of their workers as well, insinuating it would greatly benefit them in the long run. Knowing that businesses are extremely profit-motivated, I would hypothesize that more of the big businesses will latch onto this idea, which will increase the income of the typical household. This in turn increases the amount of money they have to spend on different pleasures in life. 

Theatre Titan Becomes Affordable

'Hamilton' Raises Ticket Prices: The Best Seats Will Now Cost $849

The deceptively titled article reveals that in effort to make seats more affordable to the everyday person, they raised the prices for the best seats in the house exponentially, so much so that they have shattered Broadway's top ticket price. However, they have also more than doubled the number of inexpensive seats, which are a mere ten dollars. The reasoning behind this is to make the show more affordable to the people that cannot afford the costly theatre tickets, and to work to eliminate both legal and illegal scalping, as re-sellers have been making sixty million dollars per year, which show producers do not receive, which the producers feel is unfair. They also say that by raising the prices they "take from the rich and give to the poor".

The article I have sourced from was written by Michael Paulson, June 8th, 2016. The article was published by The New York Times.

The purpose of the article was to not only raise awareness to the new ticket prices the show Hamilton has, for those that may be interested in going, but also to explain the reasoning for the change in ticket prices, and the rampant problem on Broadway of illegally re-selling tickets. This helps to draw awareness to the common individual of this problem, along with scare away any humans thinking about using this tactic. However, personally, I feel as though while these new developments may initially dissuade people from illegally scalping the tickets, the insatiable demand to see the show and the incredibly limited supply of tickets will just lead to more creative and deceptive methods of scalping. The article and drama surrounding this exchange I feel adequately demonstrates how expectations greatly influence the economic system. The expectation that Hamilton is the best show on Broadway because of all of the prestigious awards it has won, is what led to the gross increase in demand and the plethora of people re-selling their tickets for a profit to take advantage of that gross increase of demand. It also is a perfect example of an inelastic supply. No matter how much the ticket prices are, there are only a limited number of seats. Similarly the expectation from the producers that if they were to keep their prices the same, the scalping would continue, caused them to raise prices in effort to prevent it.