Imagine that you are part of the marketing management team at Home Plus, a regional discount big-box retailer who competes with Wal-Mart and Target. Home Plus currently focuses on offering a broad range of discount consumer goods, from small home furnishings and clothing to packaged goods and kitchenware. In addition to the discount lines, Home Plus carries some higher end clothes, shoes, and bedding. Some members of management believe that the best way to improve the company's competitive positioning is to concentrate more of its energies on the higher-end product lines. They have proposed that Home Plus double the number of luxury products it carries and halve the number of discount consumer packaged goods.

In an essay, explain why you would agree or disagree with the proposed change in marketing strategy. Be sure to discuss both the proposal's advantages and its disadvantages.

James Smith had a successful auto repair business. There has been a downturn in business and he is unable to pay his creditors. James is also divorced from his wife and is paying alimony to her and child support for their two children. His possessions/assets are his home; vehicle at $5,000 Don't let in tools of his trade at $7,500; personal jewelry at $6,800: personal household furnishings valued at $10,000; an un-matured life insurance at $25,000. James also serves as the Chief Counsellor for Local Government. The amount owed to his creditors is $19,500. James wants to know how he can best resolve his issues without being left penniless. Also advise James as to what process his creditors will have to go through in order to have him declared bankrupt. (25 points)

You own Home Renewal, a local furniture store specializing in unique, high quality, well-designed home furnishings. Business has been steadily growing over the past two years, but you notice that the majority of sales are from new customers with no previous experience with the store. You have not been collecting information from your customers after they make purchases from your store, so you are not aware if previous customers have positive or negative feelings about the process of shopping in Home Renewal and the products they purchased. In one or more fully formed paragraphs, identify and explain the three potential customer reactions you should evaluate after a purchase. Then, develop at least three specific responses that Home Renewal can implement to address these reactions and create repeat business from customers.

Operation
 This application calculates the charges for a stay at a hotel based on the arrival and departure dates.
 The application begins by prompting the user for the month, day, and year of the arrival and the departure.
 Next, the application displays the arrival date, the departure date, the room rate, the total price, and the number of nights.

Specifications
 Create a class named Reservation that defines a reservation. This class should contain instancevariables for the arrival date and departure date. It should also contain a constant initialized to thenightly rate of $115.00.
 The Reservation class should contain a constructor that accepts the arrival and departure dates asparameters of type Date, as well as methods that return the number of nights for the stay (calculatedby subtracting the arrival date from the departure date) and the total price (calculated by multiplyingthe number of nights for the stay by the nightly room rate). This class should also override thetoString method to return a string like this:

Arrival Date: Monday, May 16, 2005Departure Date: Wednesday, May 18, 2005Price: $115.00 per nightTotal price: $230.00 for 2 nights
 The main method for the application class should contain a loop that asks the user for the arrival anddeparture date information, creates a Reservation object, and displays the string returned by thetoString method.
 Assume valid data is entered.

Enhancements
 Add validation so the user must enter values that will result in a correct date. Allow the user to enter the date in the form mm/dd/yyyy. Allow the user to enter the room rate or select the rate from one of several available rates. Use the BigDecimal class rather than the double type for the price calculation.

Note
This application requires the use of the GregorianCalendar class to create dates from the int valuesentered by the user. Then, it requires the use of the getTime method to convert the GregorianCalendarobject to a Date object.

There are many reasons for an owner to place a brand on their hotel, but some feel that three factors are beginning to challenge the brand value proposition:

• Distribution sites, such as Expedia.com and Booking.com
• Review sites, like TripAdvisor and Yelp
• The lack of brand loyalty often shown by Millennials

Do you think these factors represent a real challenge to brands, or are they just hype? Will brands need to adjust their value proposition?

The time needed for checking in at a hotel is to be investigated. Historically, the process has had a standard deviation equal to .146. The means of 39 samples of n = 17 are

a-1. Construct an x⎯⎯x¯ -chart for this process with three-sigma limits. (Do not round intermediate calculations. Round your answers to 2 decimal places.)
  

a-2. Is the process in control?

• Yes

• No

b. Analyze the data using a median run test and an up/down run test. What can you conclude?

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1a)Suppose a regulation causes prices to rise. In order to understand the costs of the regulation it is necessary to know:

The size of the price effect

The conditions of demand

Both the price effect and the conditions of demand

How many jobs were created

b)A survey technique based on the idea that willingness to pay can be determined by asking people directly is known as:

Travel-cost approach

Direct Price Analysis

Proxy Valuation

Contingent Valuation

c)One way of valuing natural resources like open space is to analyze the effect of open space on housing prices. This type of analysis is possible because:

Houses near open space will have higher travel cost

The value of the open space will be "capitalized" into the value of the house

Housing prices are not subject to indirect price effects

Housing markets are highly regulated

What is the BENEFIT to low wage workers (workers whose wage is near the minimum wage) of raising the minimum wage?

2. What products (at least three different) of biomedical engineering do you expect to encounter in the near future

How an investor can make profit from an anticipation that stock prices will decline in near future. Explain with an example.