Informational
From the creators, to the consumers, to the resellers, the world of consumerism is a vast and complicated world. In addition to the millions of products out there, there are also millions of sites to use to buy these products. Everywhere you look, there is a deal everywhere. Frauds and scams run rampant. According to the FTC, 25 million people are affects by fraud or scams every year! This is about 11% of all of America every year. You do not want to take that chance. This is why we chose to do what we did. For our capstone project, we have chose to create a helpful website made to guide you through the storm of consumerism. In this blog, we create all kinds of guides all the way from the tip of your shoelace to the hair on your head. If you don't know what to look for when buying something, we are here. We chose to do this for our capstone over everything else for one big reason. This reason was because we were interested to learn about economy and how the things we buy actually come to the stores we go to.
Economy revolves around need and want. In fancier terms, this is also called the system of supply and demand. The definition of economy is simply the system of production and consumption within a region or state. You need supply to have demand, and you need demand to have supply. The law of supply goes that when the price of an item raises, more people will produce the item trying to gain money. This is how fads come and go. You may recognize some of these fads such as beyblades, fidget spinners, heelys, and so on. The law of demand goes that when the price of an item goes down, the demand will go up because now people who couldn't afford it can now buy it. The law of demand also states that when the price of an items goes down enough, people will start finding alternate ways of using it. For example, binder clips can be used to not only hold your paper together, but be used to hold wires to a table. In this way do producers balance the prices and products made and sold.
Where there are perfections, there are also imperfections. Nothing in this world can be fully perfect. Producers try to balance their prices as best to their abilities as possible, but of course sometime they mess up. They are human after all. When this happens, we call that inflation. The definition inflation is the rise or fall of the value of money due to the rise and fall of prices.There are really only two types of inflation, Demand-pull inflation and Cost-push inflation. Demand-pull inflation happens when people income rises, but the prices of items stay the same. This forces prices to go up, leaving people who didn't gain people in poverty. You can see this happen during the Great Depression. The other form of inflation is Cost-push inflation. Cost-push inflation happens when the cost for producing an item goes up, but your income stays the same. All in all, inflation sucks and hurts a lot of people.
To make keep up with the demand, there must be businesses made to produce the supply. There are several types of businesses out there today: Pure competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, and monopoly. Each of these terms describe the market structure in which each business falls into depending on how many others are producing the same product alongside them; their competition. In the Pure Competition market, it is very easy to enter the market, there are many competitors, and every product is almost exactly the same. One example of pure competition in the real world right now is the bread industry. There are many brands and each loaf is almost the same. The next type of competition is the monopolistic competition. This market is almost like the pure competition market, but with less competition and has more variety in products. For example, some monopolistic companies include barber shops and restaurants. Third, the oligopoly market where there are just a few large firms controlling the market and it's fairly hard to enter. Some of these markets include car companies. Lastly, the last type of company is a Monopoly. This type of company only has one big company controlling it with no competition at all, and they have the power to control the price you have to pay because you have no where else to go to. one example of a monopoly today is the company Monsanto.
In conclusion, this project was super fun. In my spare time, I usually just sit around and did nothing. This project gave me something fun that I never knew that I would enjoy to do in my spare time. I loved being able to see how our blog was doing and how it grew. Today, our blog has hit over 2,000 views. This great experience that I will take with me through my years through high school and college. I've always found economy interesting and I just love shopping. Together, this made the best capstone I could've done. I will still work on my blog even when the project is over. I can't wait to see how big this becomes.
