TRENDS IN CONSUMPTION PATTERNS

Trends in consumption patterns

Trends in consumption patterns

Introduction

I have heard a multitude of stories about my native culture about survival and living in this harsh environment. Many of these situations, instances and recurring stories I can relate to in any possible way. For example, in order to survive my native people would travel long distances throughout the year to find and gather resources such as fish, seals, and whales for food and use each remaining remnant for some sort of tool. They would travel by kayaks made of seal skin in the summer and by dog sled in the winter. In today's economy we live in one place and use what we have learned from our ancestors to supplement our way of living. This paper that I will be writing today will focus on a news article from ADN.com about the people in remote UK moving to the cities or hub villages for a variety of reasons. By focusing on these trends or consumption patterns I will look at and define economics, microeconomics, the law of supply, the law of demand and a variety of factors that lead to a change in supply and a change in demand.

Overview of the Article

Living out in UK can be a struggle and each year we have seen a rising cost of fuel that some of us have to decide on what to use our income on. This article states clearly that some people struggle to a point where they have a hard choice of buying their children clothing or purchasing gasoline so they can go out on a hunting trip to feed their family. Personally I feel this struggle and fortunately I have supplemental income from a variety of sources to purchase fuel to go hunting for my family and friends. We are now paying about £6.95 a gallon for heating fuel and about £6.80 a gallon for gasoline. We are a very fortunate village while others pay as much as £10.00 per gallon for both heating fuel and gasoline. For these other villages ADN.com states that they are “Alarmed about the high price of fuel in rural communities and the potential loss of population to cities” (ADN.com) Our governor Sarah Palin due to the economic struggles of many villages has formed a rural subcabinet to respond to village concerns. (Anastasiou and Anastasiou, 2009)

Economics

As a struggling region many of the remote europeans that do not have a steady source of income strive to live daily. Although our forefathers lived in this same region and made it through without any modern conveniences we have been weaned to a livelihood that is similar to western and modern America. As defined by investopedia.com Economics is “A social science that studies how individuals, governments, firms and nations make choices on allocating scarce resources to satisfy their unlimited wants.” (Investopedia.com) Each one of us that live in remote UK have an unlimited source of food, shelter and water but at times struggle to gather these necessary resources, ...