College Algebra: Solving Business Problems

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You know, back in the late 90's, Beanie Babies were just the craze. This is Gobble, the Beanie Baby, and sometimes these are great examples of mathematical principles. In fact, with Gobbles here - let me tell you something about Gobbles. The price of Gobbles actually fell 20% this year. And now, Gobbles the Beanie Baby is currently selling $750.00. These things are collector's items, folks. $750.00 now, after it fell 20%. And the question is how much did it cost last year?
Okay, well how can we figure this out? Well, let's think about it together and see if we can reason together. We don't know how much the Beanie Baby cost a year ago. That's what we're trying to find out, but we do know how much it costs now. So let's let that unknown price be p. So p equals the price of Gobbles last year. Now what do I know about the price of Gobbles this year? Well, actually, I know two pieces of information, if you look over there. The first one is the price is $750.00, but the second thing I know about the price is that it is 20% less than the price it was previously.
Now, what does that mean? It means that the price fell 20%, so I'm going to subtract something from this price. And how much do I subtract from that price? I subtract 20% of this price. So what I do is I take the price p and I subtract off 20%, and 20% is just .2 p. So if I take the price and deduct it, I have it fall 20% of the price - so, for example, suppose the Beanie Baby cost $10.00 and the price fell 50%. Well, I find 50% of $10.00, which is $5.00, and so then the price would go from 10 to 10 - 5, which would be 5, which is right. It fell 50%. If it falls 20%, then, in fact, I have p - .2p. And that equals, well, we know what it equals, it equals 750. So now I have the equation and it's really easy to solve this, because 1p - .2p = .8p and that equals 750. And so if I divide both sides by .8, what I see is that p = . And if you divide that out, you'll see $937.50.
Does that answer at least sound reasonably reasonable? The price last year should be higher than this year's price, because remember this year's price, we had a fall in price. So the $750.00 is this year's price, so last year's price should be higher, and that's at least the number we're getting $937.50. And, in fact, you can check this by taking 20% of this number and then taking $937.50, subtracting the 20% and you should get that.
So that's the answer to this question. When you have a price drop or a price increase by a certain amount, you either add or subtract the right percentage and that's it. So that takes care of the little explanation here of the little Gobbles, the Beanie Baby.
However, there's a bonus question here, and the bonus question is just very simply this: what's the explanation for the Beanie Baby craze from the 90's? Everyone was buying these things. They were just a fortune. Well, the answer is they're so cute and they're just - I don't know what it is, but oh, this one seems to be having a little dietary problem of some kind here. I guess this wasn't quite toilet trained yet. But anyway, these Beanie Babies are as cute as they can be and I just hope that this one didn't eat too much gobbling. So I think we'll call it quits on the Beanie Baby front and I'll clean up these little Beanie Baby jellybeans. All right, I'll see you soon.
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