Payday loan
A payday loan is a small, short-term unsecured loan, "regardless of whether repayment of loans is linked to a borrower's payday." The loans are sometimes referred to as "cash advances," though that term can refer to cash provided against a prearranged line of credit such as a credit card. Payday advance loans rely on the consumer having previous employment records. Legislation regarding payday loans varies between different countries, in federal systems, between different states or provinces. To prevent usury, some jurisdictions limit the annual percentage rate that any lender, including payday lenders, can charge; some jurisdictions outlaw payday lending and some have few restrictions on payday lenders. In the United States, the rates of these loans used to be restricted in most states by the Uniform Small Loan Laws, with 36–40% APR the norm. There are many different ways. Depending on which method is used, the rate calculated may differ dramatically. Although some have noted that these loans appear to carry substantial risk to the lender, it has been shown that these loans carry no more long term risk for the lender than other forms of credit.
These studies seem to be confirmed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings of at least one lender, who notes a charge-off rate of 3.2%. The basic loan process involves a lender providing a short-term unsecured loan to be repaid at the borrower's next payday; some verification of employment or income is involved, although according to one source, some payday lenders do not verify income or run credit checks. Individual companies and franchises have their own underwriting criteria. In the traditional retail model, borrowers visit a payday lending store and secure a small cash loan, with payment due in full at the borrower's next paycheck; the borrower writes a postdated check to the lender in the full amount of the loan plus fees. On the maturity date, the borrower is expected to return to the store to repay the loan in person. If the borrower does not repay the loan in person, the lender may redeem the check. If the account is short on funds to cover the check, the borrower may now face a bounced check fee from their bank in addition to the costs of the loan, the loan may incur additional fees or an increased interest rate as a result of the failure to pay.
In the more recent innovation of online payday loans, consumers complete the loan application online. The funds are transferred by direct deposit to the borrower's account, the loan repayment and/or the finance charge is electronically withdrawn on the borrower's next payday. According to a study by The Pew Charitable Trusts, "Most payday loan borrowers are white and are 25 to 44 years old. However, after controlling for other characteristics, there are five groups that have higher odds of having used a payday loan: those without a four-year college degree. Most borrowers use payday loans to cover ordinary living expenses over the course of months, not unexpected emergencies over the course of weeks; the average borrower is indebted about five months of the year. This reinforces the findings of the U. S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study from 2011 which found black and Hispanic families, recent immigrants, single parents were more to use payday loans. In addition, their reasons for using these products were not as suggested by the payday industry for one time expenses, but to meet normal recurring obligations.
Research for the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation found that a majority of Illinois payday loan borrowers earn $30,000 or less per year. Texas' Office of the Consumer Credit Commissioner collected data on 2012 payday loan usage, found that refinances accounted for $2.01 billion in loan volume, compared with $1.08 billion in initial loan volume. The report did not include information about annual indebtedness. A letter to the editor from an industry expert argued that other studies have found that consumers fare better when payday loans are available to them. Pew's reports have focused on how payday lending can be improved, but have not assessed whether consumers fare better with or without access to high-interest loans. Pew's demographic analysis was based on a random-digit-dialing survey of 33,576 people, including 1,855 payday loan borrowers. In another study, by Gregory Elliehausen, Division of Research of the Federal Reserve System and Financial Services Research Program at the George Washington University School of Business, 41% earn between $25,000 and $50,000, 39% report incomes of $40,000 or more.
18% have an income below $25,000. In the UK Sarah-Jayne Clifton of the Jubilee Debt Campaign said, “austerity, low wages, insecure work are driving people to take on high cost debt from rip-off lenders just to put food on the table. We need the government to take urgent action, not only to rein in rip-off lenders, but to tackle the cost of living crisis and cuts to social protection that are driving people towards the loan sharks in the first place.” The likelihood that a family will use a payday loan increases if they are unbanked or underbanked, or lack access to a traditional deposit bank account. In an Ame
Potato
The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial nightshade Solanum tuberosum. In many contexts, potato refers to the edible tuber, but it can refer to the plant itself. Common or slang terms include tater and spud. Potatoes were introduced to Europe in the second half of the 16th century by the Spanish. Today they are a staple food in many parts of the world and an integral part of much of the world's food supply; as of 2014, potatoes were the world's fourth-largest food crop after maize and rice. Wild potato species can be found from the United States to southern Chile; the potato was believed to have been domesticated independently in multiple locations, but genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species traced a single origin for potatoes. In the area of present-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia, from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex, potatoes were domesticated 7,000–10,000 years ago. In the Andes region of South America, where the species is indigenous, some close relatives of the potato are cultivated.
Following millennia of selective breeding, there are now over 1,000 different types of potatoes. Over 99% of presently cultivated potatoes worldwide descended from varieties that originated in the lowlands of south-central Chile, which have displaced popular varieties from the Andes; the importance of the potato as a food source and culinary ingredient varies by region and is still changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe eastern and central Europe, where per capita production is still the highest in the world, while the most rapid expansion in production over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia, with China and India leading the world in overall production as of 2014. Being a nightshade similar to tomatoes, the vegetative and fruiting parts of the potato contain the toxin solanine and are not fit for human consumption. Normal potato tubers that have been grown and stored properly produce glycoalkaloids in amounts small enough to be negligible to human health, but if green sections of the plant are exposed to light, the tuber can accumulate a high enough concentration of glycoalkaloids to affect human health.
The English word potato comes from Spanish patata. The Spanish Royal Academy says the Spanish word is a hybrid of the Taíno batata and the Quechua papa; the name referred to the sweet potato although the two plants are not related. The 16th-century English herbalist John Gerard referred to sweet potatoes as "common potatoes", used the terms "bastard potatoes" and "Virginia potatoes" for the species we now call "potato". In many of the chronicles detailing agriculture and plants, no distinction is made between the two. Potatoes are referred to as "Irish potatoes" or "white potatoes" in the United States, to distinguish them from sweet potatoes; the name spud for a small potato comes from the digging of soil prior to the planting of potatoes. The word has an unknown origin and was used as a term for a short knife or dagger related to the Latin "spad-" a word root meaning "sword", it subsequently transferred over to a variety of digging tools. Around 1845, the name transferred to the tuber itself, the first record of this usage being in New Zealand English.
The origin of the word "spud" has erroneously been attributed to an 18th-century activist group dedicated to keeping the potato out of Britain, calling itself The Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet. It was Mario Pei's 1949 The Story of Language. Pei writes, "the potato, for its part, was in disrepute some centuries ago; some Englishmen who did not fancy potatoes formed a Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet. The initials of the main words in this title gave rise to spud." Like most other pre-20th century acronymic origins, this is false, there is no evidence that a Society for the Prevention of Unwholesome Diet existed. Potato plants are herbaceous perennials that grow about 60 cm high, depending on variety, with the leaves dying back after flowering and tuber formation, they bear white, red, blue, or purple flowers with yellow stamens. In general, the tubers of varieties with white flowers have white skins, while those of varieties with colored flowers tend to have pinkish skins.
Potatoes are cross-pollinated by insects such as bumblebees, which carry pollen from other potato plants, though a substantial amount of self-fertilizing occurs as well. Tubers form in response to decreasing day length, although this tendency has been minimized in commercial varieties. After flowering, potato plants produce small green fruits that resemble green cherry tomatoes, each containing about 300 seeds. Like all parts of the plant except the tubers, the fruit contain the toxic alkaloid solanine and are therefore unsuitable for consumption. All new potato varieties are grown from seeds called "true potato seed", "TPS" or "botanical seed" to distinguish it from seed tubers. New varieties grown from seed can be propagated vegetatively by planting tubers, pieces of tubers cut to include at least one or two eyes, or cuttings, a practice used in greenhouses for the production of healthy seed tubers. Plants propagated from tubers are clones of the parent, whereas those propagated from seed produce a range of different varieties.
There are about 5,000 potato varieties worldwide. Three thousand of them are found in the Andes alone in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, they belong to eight or nine species, dependin
Closeout (sale)
A closeout or clearance sale is a discount sale of inventory either by retail or wholesale. It may be that a product is not selling well, or that the retailer is closing because of relocation, a fire, over-ordering, or because of bankruptcy. In the latter case, it is known as a going-out-of-business sale or liquidation sale, is part of the process of liquidation. A hail sale is a closeout at a car dealership after hail damage. A store, closing will advertise to customers their last chance to buy; however closures are from companies that can't sell their inventory, inventors whose ideas were not marketable, or businesses needing fast incoming cashflow to pay debts such as payroll or rent. A closeout store is a retailer specializing in buying closeout items wholesale from others and selling them at low prices. Big Lots is a well-known closeout retail chain in the United States, but other stores such as TJ Maxx, Ross Dress For Less and Value City are common, specializing more in clothing and housewares.
Some clearance merchandise is non-returnable at some stores, as the intent is of course to get rid of the items. This is the case with liquidation and store-closing sales. However, in many jurisdictions such as the United Kingdom, consumers retain their usual rights during a sale, such as the right to return faulty goods and the right to return goods granted by the Distance Selling Regulations. Rather than storing merchandise until the following year every U. S. store has clearance sales around national holidays, sometimes starting before the holiday. Early discounts are around 25%, but can be as much as 50% if prices were increased before the holiday. 50% is common just after the holiday followed by 75%, sometimes 90%. These may be advertised as "everything Santa Claus forgot." In Canada and the United Kingdom, Boxing Day sales draw large crowds of shoppers seeking after-Christmas deals. Some stores do pack up holiday merchandise after going 50% off for a week or so, but fail to remove the items from shelves before going back to regular price if the items are non-perishable.
Some wholesalers sell items on "sale or return", whereby retailers can return unsold items to the wholesaler and be credited a proportion of the cost. The wholesaler can resell the items to a closeout store at a discount; some customers take note of when specific retailers mark down merchandise further, showing up at the store on the first day for the best selection. Seasonal merchandise is put on clearance to make space for new seasonal stock; some thrift stores have "rolling" closeouts. In this case, all merchandise put out in a given week is given a colored tag, or a letter to indicate what color if the item is directly marked with a grease pencil. During the last week before the color is used again, everything marked in that color is discounted by 50%. At the end of the week, all remaining item with that tag color are removed from the shelves. There are four colors, so that all merchandise is rotated every month or so; some independent stores use similar systems. Clearance sales occur on marked racks in brick-and-mortar stores.
Stores place merchandise on a "clearance rack" and periodically reduce the price until someone buys it, as in a Dutch auction. This process has been replicated on the internet; the defunct drop.com was the first clearance website to mimic a retail store clearance rack by allowing sellers to automatically mark down their items to a pool of consumers. Fire sale High-low pricing
French fries
French fries, or fries. French fries are served hot, either soft or crispy, are eaten as part of lunch or dinner or by themselves as a snack, they appear on the menus of diners, fast food restaurants and bars, they are salted and, depending on the country, may be served with ketchup, mayonnaise, tomato sauce, or other local specialties. Fries can be topped more as in the dishes of poutine or chili cheese fries. Chips can be made from other sweet potatoes instead of potatoes. A baked variant, oven chips, uses no oil. One common fast food dish is fish and chips. French fries are prepared by first cutting the potato into strips, which are wiped off or soaked in cold water to remove the surface starch, dried, they may be fried in one or two stages. Chefs agree that the two-bath technique produces better results. Potatoes fresh out of the ground can have too high a water content—resulting in soggy fries—so preference is for those that have been stored for a while. In the two-stage or two-bath method, the first bath, sometimes called blanching, is in hot fat to cook them through.
This step can be done in advance. They are more fried in hot fat to crisp the exterior, they are placed in a colander or on a cloth to drain and served. The exact times of the two baths depend on the size of the potatoes. For example, for 2–3 mm strips, the first bath takes about 3 minutes, the second bath takes only seconds. One can cook french fries using several techniques. Deep frying submerges food in hot fat, most oil. Vacuum fryers are suitable to process low-quality potatoes with higher sugar levels than normal, as they have to be processed in spring and early summer before the potatoes from the new harvest become available. In the UK, a chip pan is a deep-sided cooking pan used for deep-frying. Chip pans are named for their traditional use in frying chips. Most french fries are produced from frozen potatoes which have been blanched or at least air-dried industrially. Most chains that sell fresh cut fries use the Idaho Russet Burbank variety of potatoes, it has been the standard for french fries in the United States.
The usual fat for making french fries is vegetable oil. In the past, beef suet was recommended with vegetable shortening as an alternative. In fact, McDonald's used a mixture of 93% beef tallow and 7% cottonseed oil until 1990, when they switched to vegetable oil with beef flavoring. Starting in the 1960s, more fast food restaurants have been using frozen french fries. In the United States and most of Canada, the term french fries, sometimes capitalized as French fries, or shortened to fries, refers to all dishes of fried elongated pieces of potatoes. Variations in shape and size may have names such as curly fries, shoestring fries, etc.. In the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand, the term chips is used instead, though thinly cut fried potatoes are sometimes called french fries, skinny fries, or pommes frites, to distinguish them from chips, which are cut thicker. A person from the US or Canada might instead refer to these more thickly-cut chips as steak fries or potato wedges, depending on the shape, as the word chips is more used to refer to potato chips, known in the UK and Ireland as crisps.
Thomas Jefferson had "potatoes served in the French manner" at a White House dinner in 1802. The expression "french fried potatoes" first occurred in print in English in the 1856 work Cookery for Maids of All Work by E. Warren: "French Fried Potatoes. – Cut new potatoes in thin slices, put them in boiling fat, a little salt. This account referred to thin, shallow-fried slices of potato – it is not clear where or when the now familiar deep-fried batons or fingers of potato were first prepared. In the early 20th century, the term "french fried" was being used in the sense of "deep-fried" for foods like onion rings or chicken; the French and Belgians have an ongoing dispute about where fries were invented, with both countries claiming ownership. From the Belgian standpoint the popularity of the term "french fries" is explained as a "French gastronomic hegemony" into which the cuisine of Belgium was assimilated because of a lack of understanding coupled with a shared language and geographic proximity of the countries.
Belgian journalist Jo Gérard claims that a 1781 family manuscript recounts that potatoes were deep-fried prior to 1680 in the Meuse valley, in what was the Spanish Netherlands: "The inhabitants of Namur and Dinant had the custom of fishing in the Meuse for small fish and frying among the poor, but when the river was frozen and fishing became hazardous, they cut potatoes in the form of small fish and put them in a fryer like those here." Gérard has not produced the manuscript that supports this claim due to the fact that it is unrelated to the history of the French fry, as the potato did not arrive in the region until around 1735. Given 18th century economic conditions: "It is unthinkable that a peasant could have dedicated large quantities of fat for cooking potatoes. At most they were sautéed in a pan...". At least one source says that "french fries" for deep-fried potato batons was introduced when American and British soldiers arrived in Belgium during World War I; the Belgians had been catering to the British soldiers'
Superior good
Superior goods or luxury goods make up a larger proportion of consumption as income rises, therefore are a type of normal goods in consumer theory. Such a good must possess two economic characteristics: it must be scarce, along with that, it must have a high price; the scarcity of the good can be artificial. Possession of such a good signifies "superiority" in resources, is accompanied by prestige; the prestige-value of some superior goods is so high. The income elasticity of a superior good is above one by definition, because it raises the expenditure share as income rises. A superior good may be a luxury good, not purchased at all below a certain level of income. Examples would include smoked salmon and caviar, most other delicacies. On the other hand, superior goods may have a wide quality distribution, such as wine and holidays; the choice of the word "superior" to define goods of this type suggests that they are the antonym of "inferior goods", but this is misleading. If the quantity of an item demanded increases with income, but not by enough to increase the share of the budget spent on it it is only a normal good and is not a superior good.
Consumption of all normal goods increases as income increases. For example, if income increases by 50% consumption will increase. A superior good is a normal good for which the proportional consumption increase exceeds the proportional income increase. So, if income increases by 50% consumption of a superior good will increase by more than 50%. In economics terminology, all goods with an income elasticity of demand greater than zero are "normal", but only the subset having income elasticity of demand > 1 are "superior". Some texts on microeconomics use the term superior good as the sole alternative to an inferior good, making "superior goods" and "normal goods" synonymous. Where this is done, a product making up an increasing share of spending under income increases is called an ultra-superior good. Necessity good Behavioral economics Definition of superior good from the elasticity perspective from the University of Michigan Definition of "superior good" as a "normal good" synonym from California State University
Durable good
In economics, a durable good or a hard good is a good that does not wear out, or more one that yields utility over time rather than being consumed in one use. Items like bricks could be considered durable goods because they should theoretically never wear out. Durable goods such as refrigerators or cars continue to be useful for three or more years of use, so durable goods are characterized by long periods between successive purchases. Examples of consumer durable goods include automobiles, household goods, sports equipment, medical equipment and toys. Nondurable goods or soft goods are the opposite of durable goods, they may be defined either as goods that are consumed in one use or ones that have a lifespan of less than three years. Examples of nondurable goods include fast-moving consumer goods such as cosmetics and cleaning products, condiments, beer and tobacco, office supplies and containers, paper and paper products, personal products, plastics, textiles and footwear. While durable goods can be rented as well as bought, nondurable goods are not rented.
While buying durable goods comes under the category of investment demand of goods, buying non-durables comes under the category of consumption demand of goods. According to Cooper "durability is the ability of a product to perform its required function over a lengthy period under normal conditions of use without excessive expenditure on maintenance or repair". Several units may be used to measure the durability of a product according to its field of application such as years of existence, hours of use and operational cycles; the life span of household goods is significant for sustainable consumption. The longer product life spans could contribute to eco-efficiency and sufficiency, slowing consumption in order to progress towards a sustainable consumption. Cooper proposed a model to demonstrate the crucial role of product life spans to sustainable production and consumption. Durability as a characteristic relating to the quality of goods, that can be demanded by consumers, was not clear until an amendment of the law relating to the quality standards for supplied goods in 1994.
Coase conjecture Industrial organization Pacman conjecture Planned obsolescence Putty-putty
Goods
In economics, goods are materials that satisfy human wants and provide utility, for example, to a consumer making a purchase of a satisfying product. A common distinction is made between goods that are tangible property, services, which are non-physical. A good may be a consumable item, useful to people but scarce in relation to its demand, so that human effort is required to obtain it. In contrast, free goods, such as air, are in abundant supply and need no conscious effort to obtain them. Personal goods are things such as televisions, living room furniture, cellular telephones anything owned or used on a daily basis, not food related. Commercial goods are construed as any tangible product, manufactured and made available for supply to be used in an industry of commerce. Commercial goods could be tractors, commercial vehicles, mobile structures and roofing materials. Commercial and personal goods as categories are broad and cover everything a person sees from the time they wake up in their home, on their commute to work to their arrival at the workplace.
Commodities may be used as a synonym for economic goods but refer to marketable raw materials and primary products. Although in economic theory all goods are considered tangible, in reality certain classes of goods, such as information, only take intangible forms. For example, among other goods an apple is a tangible object, while news belongs to an intangible class of goods and can be perceived only by means of an instrument such as print or television. Goods may increase or decrease their utility directly or indirectly and may be described as having marginal utility; some things are useful, but not scarce enough to have monetary value, such as the Earth's atmosphere, these are referred to as'free goods'. In normal parlance, "goods" is always a plural word, but economists have long termed a single item of goods "a good". Ugly though this may sound, an alternative is hard to find. In economics, a bad is the opposite of a good. Whether an object is a good or a bad depends on each individual consumer and therefore, it is important to realize that not all goods are good all the time and not all goods are goods to all people.
Goods' diversity allows for their classification into different categories based on distinctive characteristics, such as tangibility and relative elasticity. A tangible good like an apple differs from an intangible good like information due to the impossibility of a person to physically hold the latter, whereas the former occupies physical space. Intangible goods differ from services in that final goods are transferable and can be traded, whereas a service cannot. Price elasticity differentiates types of goods. An elastic good is one for which there is a large change in quantity due to a small change in price, therefore is to be part of a family of substitute goods. An inelastic good is one for which there are few or no substitutes, such as tickets to major sporting events, original works by famous artists, prescription medicine such as insulin. Complementary goods are more inelastic than goods in a family of substitutes. For example, if a rise in the price of beef results in a decrease in the quantity of beef demanded, it is that the quantity of hamburger buns demanded will drop, despite no change in buns' prices.
This is. It is important to note that goods considered complements or substitutes are relative associations and should not be understood in a vacuum; the degree to which a good is a substitute or a complement depends on its relationship to other goods, rather than an intrinsic characteristic, can be measured as cross elasticity of demand by employing statistical techniques such as covariance and correlation. The following chart illustrates the classification of goods according to their exclusivity and competitiveness. Goods are capable of being physically delivered to a consumer. Goods that are economic intangibles can only be stored and consumed by means of media. Goods, both tangibles and intangibles, may involve the transfer of product ownership to the consumer. Services do not involve transfer of ownership of the service itself, but may involve transfer of ownership of goods developed or marketed by a service provider in the course of the service. For example, sale of storage related goods, which could consist of storage sheds, storage containers, storage buildings as tangibles or storage supplies such as boxes, bubble wrap, tape and the like which are consumables, or distributing electricity among consumers is a service provided by an electric utility company.
This service can only be experienced through the consumption of electrical energy, available in a variety of voltages and, in this case, is the economic goods produced by the electric utility company. While the service is a process that remains in its entirety in the ownership of the electric service provider, the goods is the object of ownership transfer; the consumer becomes electric energy owner by purchase and may use it for any lawful purposes just like any other goods. Fast-moving consumer goods Final goods Intangible asset Intangible good List of economics topics Goods and services Service Tangible property Bannock, Graham et al.. Dictionary of Economics, Penguin Books. Milgate, Murray, "goods and commodities," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 2, pp. 546–48. Includes historical and contemporary uses of the terms in economics. Media related to Good
