It’s Black Friday and customers are in a rush to get the good deals. Before Dina can unlock the doors, the crowd knocks the doors down and rush for the deals. These low prices will cause a shortage and impact the allocation of items among consumers.
As customers stand outside waiting for the store to open, one of them offers Mateo and Cheyenne $40 each to put aside one of the TVs that is on sale. Because prices are so low, there won’t be enough for all of the customers that want a TV, creating a shortage among the waiting customers. Having people wait in line helps allocate the items based on people’s willingness to spend time rather than money, but this man would prefer to have the item allocated through a black market transaction.
Glenn’s family used to own a local hardware store before Cloud 9 entered the market and put them out of business. Cloud 9 was probably able to take advantage of economies of scale and a large distribution network to offer competing products at lower prices. Monopolistic competition in the long run results in zero profits for firms, but if a small company already has relatively little profit before entry, a decrease in demand could result in that particular firm incurring losses and leaving the market. Because Sturgis and Sons specialized in hardware, some of those workers may be structurally unemployed if their skills are no longer needed in the local market. Later in the episode, Glenn finally shares his frustration with Cloud 9 and how they killed his family’s business because of their devotion to profit maximization.
Bo and Cheyenne are shopping for wedding supplies in the store. Bo really wants to buy some laptops so they can smash them during the wedding as a form of entertainment. Amy is shocked because she knows how expensive it is to raise a child and believes that the couple should be saving the money instead of spending it on one day. Amy tricks Bo into playing a game with a price gun so that Bo and Cheyenne can see how expensive a child can be. People struggle to recognize the opportunity costs in their decisions, but Amy has made the cost more salient.
The store is having a one-day wedding sale and the discounts are steep enough that there is a line of women ready to purchase products. The increased purchases represent a change in the quantity demanded for items from the store. Since they didn’t stock enough items, the low prices will result in a shortage and likely an inefficient allocation among the shoppers.
Garret notices that the store sells two dresses that look identical, but one is marketed as a white dress and the other is a white wedding dress. The wedding dress costs $200, but the other dress only costs $30. The wedding industry is notorious for high markups on products that are labeled for weddings because brides and grooms often have fairly inelastic demand for their products. Because of this inelastic demand, firms are able to price discriminate and charge higher prices.
In order to win the Color Wars, teams have to sell as much as they can. Jonah doesn’t feel comfortable with the premise of this competition, even when the customers explicitly state that money isn’t a consideration in their purchase decisions. The coffee maker with the built-in bean hopper isn’t really necessary (which Jonah points out), but the customer is displaying some conspicuous consumption behavior.
Jonah convinces Adam (Amy’s husband) to buy a new grill even though the couple doesn’t really need it. Earlier in the episode, Amy convinced Jonah to start selling stuff to people even if they don’t need it so they can win the store’s Color Wars. Adam and Amy don’t really have the savings to afford such a lavish purchase, but Jonah emphasizes how great the grill would be for Adam’s YouTube channel.
Garret is in the process of convincing a customer to purchase a more expensive bike, the Vilano Forza, but the customer wants the cheaper RX-5 bike. Price isn’t the only determinant of a consumer’s utility function and Garret tries to convince the customer that the other features of the bike are worth the price. To end the scene, Garret also tries to get the customer to buy a bicycle helmet, which is a good example of a complementary good.
Structural unemployment occurs when the skills and trades are no longer in demand from the general population rather than market fluctuations. Adam’s girlfriend, Amy, quickly points out that his travel agency failed because people use the internet to book travel and no long need travel agents.
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