Over Spring Break, I was fortunate enough to travel to Bangalore and Mysore India after being part of Washington State University's
Global Case Competition last year. The focus of the case competition was to advise a transnational corporation on doing business in Delhi, India. Unbeknownst to us at the time, our participation in the competition would earn us a sponsored trip to India!
While in India, we visited businesses (Infosys, Wipro, & NextDrop) as well as institutes (India Institute of Management and India Institute of Science). Overall, a thoroughly fantastic journey. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below!
Now for the economics! While the obvious examples may jump out at you (poverty, income inequality, technology, etc), I love pricing strategies. This shouldn't be a surprise to people who flip through my other posts, but I wanted to share with you three different photos I was able to capture. I'll admit, most of my attention was focused on things other than economics.
On the fourth day of the trip, we ventured into Mysore, India, home of the
Mysore Palace. Let's just say that the Royal Family recognizes that foreigners are willing to pay a premium to visit their residence and ride their elephants (see below).
While many of you may not know the
Rupee/Dollar exchange rate by memory, I can tell you it's approximately 50 Rupees for 1 US dollar. While not exact, it was the ratio we used to make quick calculations. The shock at the front gate was pretty large because I'm not sure any of us expected to pay five times the price of Indians. While alarming at first, we all begrudgingly handed over our Rupees and realized that about $4 wasn't too shabby after all.
And then some of the people in our group decided to ride elephants, and the
Royal Family was ready again, but this time the cost wasn't as drastic. I imagine if it was 200 Rupees, we still would have ridden them!
On the final night of our trip, Rossetti and I ventured to
MG Road in Bangalore for some last minute shopping. After spotting a Krispy Kreme on a previous night, we knew a trip to India wouldn't be nearly as fun if we couldn't say we had a donut. Low and behold,
Krispy Kreme in India offers rebates for bringing your own bags:
Every time I've seen these implemented, they always appeal to our "green" side, but really it's a cost saving tactic. If companies can convince you to bring your own bag, it lowers the cost of providing bags for you. My understanding is that 4-6 Rupees is a significant price in Bangalore, and equivalent to the 10 cents many US supermarkets offer. It was also a great excuse to share the photo with a former
WSU SES grad student who does research in this area.
