You are the type of person who excels on exams, IQ tests, and mental puzzles. Family and friends get irritated when you explain, for the umpteenth time, the difference between a partial derivative and a total derivative. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time browsing about a thrift store wanting to buy either a small, foam rubber football or an instructional DVD on learning to the play the oboe. Be on the lookout for florescent light bulbs that hum folk songs from the sixties. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter G, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 039833. Your preferred shopping venue is the Internet. Your special symbol is the exclamation point (!).

As a Purple Smarphin, you are the brightest and most intelligent person you know. And that goes for shopping, too. You know exactly what you want. You know exactly what it costs. You know exactly when and where to buy. But, of course, shopping is only one of the many activities that attracts your intellectual attention. You shop when you need to and buy if have to, but shopping is not the end all of your life.

A perfectly competitive firm's supply curve is that portion of its marginal cost curve that lies above the minimum of the average variable cost curve. A perfectly competitive firm maximizes profit by producing the quantity of output that equates price and marginal cost. As such, the firm moves along its positively-sloped marginal cost curve in response to changing prices.

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Our pedestrian's jaunt through the economy is not, unfortunately, an unrestrained shopping spree for confectioneries, spark plug tools, and Houston, Texas. We have other important errands to run. At the moment we need to hike over to Shady Valley's exclusive provider of cable television services, the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television Company, Inc., to inquire about a mysterious fee that appeared last month's bill.

The good news is that the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters (the 4M people) Cable office is a mere 2 miles (3 kilometers for the metrically inclined) from the Shady Valley Central Town Sprawling Hills Shopping Mall. A hop, skip, and a moderately long jump later, our excursion through the economy takes us to the front door of the 4M Cable Television Company where I hope to discover why last month's cable bill included a $3,569 charge for something called "The Vacation Channel." I didn't even know I had a vacation channel. (But, I'm sure it's a great channel, and if I don't have it, then I will certainly subscribe. Please don't disconnect me.)

Of course, because this an afternoon workday, the doors of the 4M office are locked. I can almost make out, through the expensive stained glass windows, what appears to be several Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television employees, with champaign bottles in hand, dancing on expensive mahogany desks. Let's not disturb them. As they say in the cable business, an upset worker is a disconnected customer.
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