Skip to main content

Supply can drive demand

In Puerto Rico there were a few movie theaters: one in each mall, a few independents here and there, and the occasional chains. City theaters which didn't have access to parking died out as they did in most of America, but overall the segment was doing well. Then Plaza decided to build a lot more theaters. I remember when the theater in Plaza was only on the third floor next to the food court close to Sears and on the opposite side from the Gonzales Padín/Borders area.

After college in those blighted days that I was unemployed in Puerto Rico with my Princeton degree (It looks so nice on the wall...) and lacked money to gas my car sometimes I begged for car rides from friends. One time a friend of mine, his girlfriend and I went to catch a movie, and I asked him for a ride since he lived near me. I ended up saving his car from getting robbed that night but more on that later.

So Plaza las Americas the central mall in San Juan, decides to double the movie theater capacity even though their theater capacity was never over full. I don't know the exact figure but let's say 85% capacity. True there were lines on Friday nights for movie tickets but that's because everybody came around the same time. But something funny happened when Plaza opened the new theaters next to Borders. The demand for going to see movies surged. Supply drove demand, though if you read traditional economics it should be the other way around. Demand should drive up supply. As people want to see more movies theater owners respond by building more theaters. But in this case more theaters were built and capacity remained at around 80% even though the quantity of theaters had doubled. So more theaters created more theater-goers.

Now funny thing Health Care works the same way. Many doctors in an area should by traditional economic logic drive health care costs down as they compete for patients but the opposite happens. With more doctors you end-up with more follow up appointments, more procedures. People decry the coming scarcity of primary care physicians but I wonder if trying to fix this by getting more doctors only makes the problem worse.

So back to the car theft story, after watching the movie which I don't remember which it was but it wasn't all that good, I was hungry and went to the Burger King, this if you're not privy to it, is a bit of an inside joke with my friend Jose Luis. He is one of this eat big once and be fine the rest of the day. I'm a snacker. I eat pretty much all day, but small amounts. I'm almost always at least a little hungry. So the joke is that I get really really hungry and we must eat, we MUST, and we stop and I'll have three bites and be done. Jose Luis would just look at me with a mixture of impatience and disbelief. By now he was used to my almost pregnant woman like cravings and he waited for me to get my snack at Burger King. I ordered some chicken tenders and waited (no joke) more than half an hour for them. Which by now had my friend and his girlfriend pissed off at me, and me sheepishly offering to just forget the food and go. Finally I get my snack (I think they went, caught the chicken, skinned it and cooked it) I eat and we're on our way. I get dropped off and a few minutes later I get a call explaining how their home had just been robbed and had they'd been there they'd have probably gotten their car stolen. Such is life in Puerto Rico.

But now the food court and the theater are nowhere close to each other.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo
2 comments
Read more

Contrasting Styles of Writing: English vs. Spanish

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English . V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing . In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication . This is a desired feature of English prose , where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most. This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spanish but unfortunately this has lead t
3 comments
Read more

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior to stud
1 comment
Read more