What is the Secret of Zara’s Success?

In december of 2004, the company you own entered into a 20-year contract with a grain supplier for daily deliveries of grain to its hot dog bun manufacturing facility. the contract called for "10,000 pounds of grain" to be delivered to the facility at the price of $100,000 per day. until february 2017, the supplier provided processed grain which could easily be used in your manufacturing process. however, no longer wanting to absorb the cost of having the grain processed, the supplier began delivering whole grain. the supplier is arguing that the contract does not specify the type of grain that would be supplied and that it has not breached the contract. your company is arguing that the supplier has an onsite processing plant and processed grain was implicit to the terms of the contract. over the remaining term of the contract, reshipping and having the grain processed would cost your company approximately $10,000,000, opposed to a cost of around $1,000,000 to the supplier. after speaking with in-house counsel, it was estimated that litigation would cost the company several million dollars and last for years. weighing the costs of litigation, along with possible ambiguity in the contract, what are three options you could take to resolve the dispute? which would be the best option for your business and why?

Suppose that jim plans to borrow money for an education at texas a& m university. jim will need to borrow $25,000 at the end of each year for the next five years (total=$125,000). jim wishes his parents could pay for his education but they can’t. at least, he qualifies for government loans with a reduced interest rate while he is in school. he has a special arrangement with aggiebank to lend him the money at a subsidized rate of 1% over five years without having to make a payment until the end of the fifth year. however, at the end of the fifth year, jim agrees to pay off the loan by borrowing from longhorn bank. longhorn bank will lend him the money he needs at an annual interest rate of 6%. jim agrees to pay back the longhorn bank with 20 annual payments and the payments will be uniform (equal annual payments including principal and interest). (i) calculate how much money jim has to borrow at the end of 5 years to pay off the loan with aggiebank. a. $121,336 b. $127,525 c. $125,000 d. $102,020 e. none of the above

The wall street journal reported that walmart stores inc. is planning to lay off 2,300 employees at its sam's club warehouse unit. approximately half of the layoffs will be hourly employees (the wall street journal, january 25-26, 2014). suppose the following data represent the percentage of hourly employees laid off for 15 sam's club stores. 55 56 44 43 44 56 60 62 57 45 36 38 50 69 65 (a) compute the mean and median percentage of hourly employees being laid off at these stores. (b) compute the first and third quartiles. (c) compute the range and interquartile range. (d) compute the variance and standard deviation. (e) do the data contain any outliers? (f) based on the sample data, does it appear that walmart is meeting its goal for reducing the number of hourly employees?