Hanbin Xue's Blog

Basically, I have learnt a lot of new knowledge in my 299 class. The perfect lecture, which gathers a large number of students into a same classroom, gives me an excellent opportunity to meet with new friends. And the tutorial gives me the detail about what the lecture teaches and enrich my knowledge learned from the lecture. Honestly saying, the greatest thing I learnt from my 299 class is how to prepare a successful interview. In my perspective, the interview is the key success to get a good job. In the class, i was taught how to prepare a successfull interview, what we should do and not do. The instructor also practiced to show us the actions during an interview. Interviews are a fact of modern life and interview skills will be used by us many times throughout our lives. Most jobs are filled as a result of these one-to-one or one-to-a panel meetings between the employer and the best candidates, but interview skills are needed in a variety of situation.  The skills i learned from class are quite useful in my real world, either in career or in friendship. I really appreciate the interview skills i learned from class, because it taught me how to face the real world.

During my first year in the Student Union, I was responsible for organizing a celebration for Teachers’ Day. Another member offered an excellent idea to me, but I was worried that he might take over my position and my leadership role. Once more, he also had a bad impression in my mind due to his poor academic performance. I faced an ethical dilemma on whether I should put forward his idea in the weekly meeting or not. Although I could ignore his idea and safely keep my position, it may have a negative impact on our team’s performance during the celebration. After weighing the values of both sides, I decided to work out a newly improved idea and plan. My efforts won the team over and our plan ensured excellent outcomes for the event. Through this experience, I learned to work rationally when facing competition. My future leadership perspective was deeply influenced and I learned to work fairly and ethically. I was able to let go of my personal bias and focus on the team’s interest rather than my own.

When i watch the TV, i always was noticed by the advertisment by McDonald’s happy meal. While whether it is a real happy meal? I also saw a video from Youtube which shows that the happly meal did not change for 6 months. 6 months! Can you believe it? I definitely can not believe the results and can not imagine the happy meals i ate before. I am really worried about if it will cause some negatively effects in my body.

As Advertising now has become a social being, it has an influence that can be persuasive, pervasive and influential that it is important that the right message is sent across. Additionally messages sent should harbour people’s thoughts, feelings and religion and avoid nudity, language and any offensive context because of the multicultural society that the world has. Moreover, advertising is often criticised for being offensive and in the bad taste – by some people is even considered as offensive for human intelligence and many consumer taste. There are several grounds for criticism e.g.: TV ad of unpleasant products (haemorrhoid treatment, diarrhoea products) or sexual explicitness.  Furthermore, advertising creates and spread stereotypes. Some commercial tend to portray certain groups in narrow and predictable fashion: Women are sexual objects and housewife’s, senior citizens are often shown as forgetful. A frequent cited criticism suggests that advertising courses people to buy items they don’t really need. Do people really need to buy thing that they probably wont use? Advertising certainly influence peoples taste and encourage them to buy things they may not take otherwise.

Customers can get Starbucks coffee beverages and whole bean coffee from its licensed stores and outlets; they can also get whole-bean coffee from its joint supermarket, grocery stores, and even order from online Starbucksvia.com. Currently, Starbucks offer the choice of coffee shipped direct to your door exactly when customers want it. In order to provide the best service to customers, Starbucks is managing an efficient supply chain in its coffee business. First of all, Starbucks build a special program to support coffee farmers on techniques. Then, it authorizes agent travel regularly to coffee growing countries to establish relationship with growers and distributors, and in sourcing coffee beans. Moreover, they use the RFID technology which was introduced to Starbucks to track cargo containers used to ship coffee and let its 40000suppliers drop off raw materials after stores have closed (Starbucks’ RFID Plan). It tracks the shipment to Starbucks joint roasting plants till they gather in the distribution center. Then, Starbucks use the same technology to distribute the coffee beans and other products to its licensed stores, outlets and its joint business partners, like supermarkets and grocery stores, so that customers can get their coffee products whenever they want. Overall, Starbucks is trying to eliminate transactions to be more efficient, which adds value for customers by making it more convenient and less expensive to purchase merchandise.

After reading Junmin Ou’s post, Amazon’s Price Strategies, I strongly agreed with him about how Amazon set its price strategies to maintain its highest profits. Basically, Amazon setsa relatively lower selling price to win the competition among the book sellers. Since Amazon is an online reltaier, there is no physical store for Amazon to sell books and related products.  Thus, the cost of running the sales department is relatively lower than other book sellers.  Moreover, Amazon also promotes ite products by free shipping if total purchase over some fix amount. This point really attract customers, because customers do not have to pay the extra money for shipping cost. Currenly, majority business firms set their price by segmentation. Firms like Walmart, Costco, they set the lowest price in the retlaining business. However, they maintain their sufficient profits by low margin, high volume strategy. Firms, like luxcury car manufacturers, they maintain their profits by high margin, low volume. Both strategy are relatively successful during their business. Thus, set a proper price with correct strategy is extremely important.

Last weekend, when i was looking at stock market, i noticed that BP’s stock price was recovering since the oil spill in april. Thus, i goole some related topics to found what truely caused by that accident. Actually, oil slicks do so much more damage than just the initial destruction we saw on the news – the effects can be very long lasting, especially on environment, economy, and human health.

Environment：Destroy Gulf area’s balanced ecosystem

There are tons of species of creatures that are affected or going to be affected by this spill. For instance, whales, dolphins, oysters and shrimp. Since the oil has been spread into the waters where they breed new generations, they are now in danger of becoming extinc天Oil breaks birds’ fly ability and drown down into water。

Economy：

Negatively affect fishing industry

According to federal statistics, there is about $1 billion of the United States’ GDP is attributed to fishing in the Gulf area. This region accounts for about a fifth of the nation’s oyster production and 75 percent of the domestic shrimp output. Moreover, due to the spill, roughly 22 percent of the Gulf is closed to seafood harvesting — mostly oyster and shrimp boats that operate within the 55,000 square miles of sea now off-limits.

Negatively affect tourism industry

According to federal statistics, $13 billion in tourism in Gulf contributes to US GDP. Since tourism is the main factor which is economic affected by BP oil spill.This is especially true for Florida, where the state relies completely on revenue from tourists and has no state income tax. This loss of tourism could slow down the economy of Florida, and the entire Gulf region.

Hedge people’s income by negatively affect job market/local business

The oil disaster caused problems for many other businesses. For example, boats rental, hotel, restaurant and retail business. This results a dramatic decline of job demand in Gulf. It estimates 1 million job losses in the next 5 years, and price of real estate has been projected to fall up to 10 percent.

People’s health/lives：

How the Oil Spill Affects Workers

An increase in respiratory symptoms, headaches, throat and eye irritation, rashes and other skin problems among the clean-up workers.

How the Oil Spill Affects the General Public

Because the oil vapor travels with the wind, human beings who are inland will suffer from a health aspect. There have already been reports of people experiencing nausea, vomiting, breathing difficulty, headaches, and more health problems in some gulf coast towns.

By and large, we should take measures to prevent the same kind of accidents happen again, because it takes decades to clean the pollution and ecosystem recover.

After reading the blog post of Canada Business Is e-business for small business, a new perception come into my mind. There is no doubt that e-business can also help your company connect with your customers, collaborate with your business partners, and lower your costs, while cost efficient for firms. However, as the post indiates that firms who relay on e-business should clearly understand the poential risks. For instance, security is the major issue during e-business. Crimials are happened through internet. Some people create spy software, virus and software bugs to obtain those e-business privacy information, like banking information, and distrub the current businesss management. Thus, some large business invest a lot of money on developing purely online business website to eliminate those issues. For instance, Alibaba and Ebay provide secure and stable systems to enable people open online shop through them. They create paypal to ensure the safety of each money transaction between a seller and buyer. These online business website helps those small business lower their cost, run effciently, and provide a stage to enable them show themselves to the public and catch more business opportunities from the world. E-business is relatively easier to enter and leave. It is a good start for small business.

 

Last Friday, we did our HRM barginning to negotiate benefits, wage adjustment, and some other isses which relate to employees and management’s benefits.

There are many internal and external factors that strengthen management and union bargaining power. Externally, market and manufacture structure and current economic conditions are critical factors influencing market power. Our case is a furniture manufacturer which manufacturing methods rely heavily on the labour force. This leads to high bargaining power for unions, as the demand and necessity for workers is extremely high. In addition, its market is structured such that most furniture manufacturing firms have a supplier between them and the end-consumers. The existence of dependence on others becomes an advantageous factor for unions, as manufacturers would want to avoid risk of deterioration of the relationships between them and the suppliers. However, since there are many suppliers willing to distribute the same products, we see an opposing advantage for management. British Columbia legislation prohibits the use of replacement workers during strikes, which also affords the union greater bargaining power.

Internally, the most critical factor that determines bargaining power is whether union members are sufficiently committed to issues involved during negotiations to go on strike. During negotiation, the union bargaining unit members explicitly state that they are willing to go on strike if they cannot reach their resistance points on their highly ranked issues. Thus this commitment also affords the union greater bargaining power for this negotiation. Current collective bargaining agreements in the industry seem to have been less favorable to the union than those Bigsit has been operating with, and this provides management a strong advantage when bargaining.

Overall, we feel that management had more power during the negotiations, albeit the union may have held more power on certain issues.

The US government is the main cause of high inflation.  The Federal Reserve launched a fresh effort on Wednesday to support the struggling U.S. economy, committing to buy $600 billion in government bonds despite concerns the programme could do more harm than good. Although this may help United States recover from the economic recession, it will result high risk of global economy. Actually, the US dollar is push other countries’ inflation by reducing their debt which hold by other countries. Increasing the amount of currency without increasing the value it represents just makes the currency worth less than when you started.  So printing more dollars might help you pay a debt that was incurred in “old dollars,” but everyone would get hurt. People holding debt would lose because they’d get paid in worthless currency. Consumers would have to go shopping with a suitcase instead of a wallet by the resulted high inflation.

Are you ready for Christmas sale? Obviously, it’s the most profitable season for retails. Thus, what strategies that those retails are used to prepare the hotest sales season is the key determination whether they are successful in business or not.

Sales create excitement and opportunity. Most important, sales generate cash flow and movement of slow inventory, allowing new products to be purchased for stores. Because of the current economic climate, seasonal products and some non-essential items may require an additional push. First of all,  evaluate your holiday product three weeks, or approximately 30 days, before the holiday season starts. Second,  you have to rearrange the current supply chain to fit the new sales situation, so that the manufacturer, wholesaler, logistics, and retailers can work together more efficietly. Third, you develop a acceptable and targeted price to maximize business profits and consumers’ satisfaction. Finally, you should better to manage your current inventory and prepare sales inventory.