S is for Supply

To whom it may concern,
After learning about demand, we swiftly moved onto the topic of supply, which only took us two days to cover. I already knew a lot about supply because of working in the student store, and all my other previous business classes. The only topic that I didn't know that much about was elastic and inelastic supply because we didn't go over that in any of my other classes. However, learning about the elasticity of supply made me understand the concept of supply even more because of what I had already learned before.
In this unit we learned all about supply (obviously), the law of supply, elasticity of supply, and the change in supply at each and every price. And ultimately how supply differs from demand. First, supply is basically just how much a product is supplied at each price. The law of supply is the opposite of the law of demand. In supply, as the prices go up, the quantity supplied also goes up because the business person has more of a motivation to sell it because they're getting more profit. So obviously if the price is $100 compared to $10, the business is going to supply more product at $100 because they're going to make more money out of it. The elasticity of supply is basically the same thing as the elasticity of demand. An elastic product is something that factories can produce in bulk, so they're very flexible if they ever need to produce a lot more because of the tastes of consumers. An inelastic product is something that factories can't produce in bulk. It's a product that takes a lot of steps to make, and if consumers all of a sudden demand more of them, it's very hard to produce them faster because they're just not made to work that way. The last thing we talked about with supply, was the change in supply at each and every price. This idea is relatively the same as demand, with the curves moving in toward zero and away towards zero, and the factors that control those. I'll talk about this more later when I give real life examples, because it's easier to explain.
So one example I wanted to give was for the elasticity of supply. First of all, an elastic example would be like when there's two football teams in the Superbowl, both businesses/factories can produce a ton of hats, socks, shirts etc. with the winning team name on it for both sides. So then when one of the teams wins, they have all those products already ready to go, while they just ship the losing teams' products elsewhere. An example of inelastic supply is like the iPhone. Think about it, it takes a lot of work and labor to make one iPhone. There's all kinds of machines that help out in the production and whatnot. So, they can only produce a certain amount at any given speed, so if they run out in the stores, it's going to take a while to completely restock again. This happened in Corvallis when the new iPhone 4S came out. It sold out within 2 hours of opening! An example of CISAEAEP is if a new machine comes out that produces buttons faster, then the company will be able to have a larger quantity of buttons at the same price which would shift the demand curve outwards. There are lots of real life examples like this, and lots of differing factors that can shift the supply curve either outwards or inwards. Where the supply and demand curve meet is called the equilibrium, or market price. Hypothetically, at the end of the day you should sell out of your product at that given price, and have no more people who want to buy it, but we all know that never really happens. For example, in the student store, we're constantly restocking all of our snacks so we never run out. We take inventory and price accordingly, but always restock at the end of each week. If we had to restock earlier than one week, then we know that we're not supplying enough because the demand of the product is higher than we expected!