Discussion Questions on Aplia

In my opinion, the families which use the service must earn more money per unit of time than those families that don’t use it. The family should be able to earn more than the high-quality laundry service cost in the period time that it cost to do the laundry themselves. Say, if members of one family only have part time jobs, they have enough time to do the laundry themselves. The opportunity cost for them to do so is the time it cost to walk to the laundry place and load and unload wash. It may take some of their time of watching TV and having fun. On the other hand, for those families that have full time jobs and make more money per hour, the opportunity cost for them are much higher. If they walk to the laundry place inside of asking the service to pick their clothes up and wash for them, it will cost their time of relaxing after the whole day working, and the scarce of relaxing time will lead a bad work next day; if it affects their salaries, that will be a big problem in a long term run. Therefore, spending some money and use the high-quality laundry service is worth for them.
The key differences between these two types of families should be the money they can earn in the unit of time. It is the opportunity cost for those tow types of families to do the laundry.


For the second discussion question, my answer is: the value of the particular item and the cost of washing it are the factors that might influence my decision.
According to the article, American washing machines are not good for clothes, of course I will send the expensive clothes to the service. For example, there is a $1,000 dollar value dress, and it is cost $10 to make the service wash it for me, and I can wear it 100 times before it is wore out.
If I wash it at home, say, it cost $2 to wash it every single time, but I can only wear it 10 times before it is wore out or broken by the washing machine. That is, if I send the dress to the service to wash after every time I wore it, it costs $20 for each time I wear it [($10*100+$1,000)/100=$20], but it cost $102 for each time if I wash it at home. If $1,000 is not a big deal for you, then think about it in this way: if you wash the dress at home, after 10 times wash, you through it away, but you still need another dress which likes it and also cost for $1,000 because you need this kind of dress for 100 times. Therefore, you need 10 dresses for 100 times, and that is $1,000*10 = $10,000, and total washing cost is $2*10*100 = $2,000, so total cost is $12,000. It is easy to see that it’s way more expensive to do so.
However, I will wash a $10 value clothes at home.


They are both efficient, in my point of view. The situation in Europe is different from it in the US. European washing machines use less water, and it is also smaller and washing clothes in a soft way and keeping clothes in good shapes for a longer time. It is efficient for European because clothes cost more there. For Americans, they believe in “time is money”; therefore, to save time is the goal for them to use the washing machines that take less time. Even the machines are not as good for clothes as those in Europe, but the clothes are cheaper in the US. Also, they may want to save time from doing laundry to work and make more money.