Touchpad Firesale

From economics 101 we know initial price can be calculated by adding the cost price plus a mark up that would attract a consumer to buy the product. There can be several factors affecting this equation like break even time, branding of product, competition , value add of product .
A study of consumer behavior would give me a lot of information to price the product because at the end of day that will be a major driver in pricing.
A recent case to study on these lines would be of HP touchpad ,the new tablet was sold at 499$ and with a decision to move away from PC business and stopping support on WebOS , HP started selling the same model for 99$.There were lines of folks outside bestbuy and other retailers and it sold out in one day. HP must have done a good initial pricing due diligence effort to begin with but one still wonders what was the real reason ?

Are Corporate Profits related to Employment ?

I don’t see a direct correlation between corporate profits and employment and in fact would suggest that when the world is becoming flatter and flatter and technology advances at a high-speed this basic notion of “If a company is doing well it will hire more” will slowly taper out.
Take for example Consulting and Professional services sector which has done well and thus Big 5 are hiring in India and China at breakneck speed .Same goes to Manufacturing sector where technological advancements and outsourcing have kept the company profits buoyant where as hiring is down. I think this is a fundamental supply problem, think of it as this way , If Walmart gets a product manufactured for lesser cost than doing it in China why would it not change its procurement policies ?

Now this can be done either 2 ways one is to increase our population and thus the add cheaper workforce (which is not practical) or get the use of technology to reduce the price to produce. The demand is there but supply of labor force is short

Unemployment and potential areas for growth

For a substantial increase in GDP we agree that we need increased consumer spending and for increasing consumer spending we need to put money in people’s pockets and for that we need folks to get jobs.
This train of thoughts led me to see which occupational areas are promising and see a potential growth and here is what I pulled from a couple of sites
Unemployment statistics
• Number of unemployed = 14 million
• % Unemployed Present = 9.1
• Long term unemployed (27 weeks and over)= 6 million
• % Long term unemployed = 49.2 % of Unemployed
• % Unemployed Jan 08 = 5 %
From the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics the fastest growing occupations from the year 2008 and projected to year 2018
I have shortlisted this list only for folks with Moderate to Short-term on-the-job training (the reason being we cannot send masses to a 4 year degree and short to moderate on the job training would be practical way forward).
Here are the areas of occupation and % increase we see majority of jobs being created in the Healthcare sector so in case we focus on this area more than other areas we can see a substantial growth in job market
• Home health aides 50%
• Personal and home care aides 47%
• Physical therapist aides 36%
• Medical assistants 33%
• Physical therapist assistants 30%
• Occupational therapist aides 30%

Source of my data : http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_103.htm