Brookline Business Research | Part 1

-

Hello, and thank you for checking out my blog! My name is Avyaya, a student at Brookline High School in Massachusetts. As you probably noticed from the title of my blog, I am interested in data, particularly how it can affect and change our lives. Through policy, I aim to convey my thoughts on these topics through a data-driven lens. This is my first blog post, but I have a lot I want to discuss, documenting my learning, and delving deeper into other topics I love. However, today, I want to address an issue that's currently affecting Brookline. Tariffs have affected the place I call home, affecting local businesses that remain special to the community. 

For some background, Brookline is a suburb of Boston. It's technically a town, but it's a city, with its unique local shops, vibrant culture, and diverse community. The area features a range of environments, from the quiet, peaceful south, with large homes, lovely parks, and a population of older retirees, to the bustling north, with vibrant streets and endless entertainment options. While the community is diverse, we are whole. Recent tariff calls have put pressure on restaurants and small businesses in the greater Boston area. When our local shops are facing issues, we feel it too.

So, what is a tariff? A tariff is a tax imposed on goods imported from another country. They are often used to protect domestic industries from foreign competition and encourage the purchase of goods within local markets. While, in theory, this practice can be beneficial, it can hurt industries that rely heavily on imports. For example, if a company wishes to source spices from India and the government imposes a 20% tariff on those imports, the company must pay the 20% tax to import the goods. In response, many companies either change suppliers or pass the increased costs on to consumers.

An article in The Daily Free Press, an independent student newspaper at Boston University, stated that tariff policies "could spike the price of eating out, as some believe restaurants will pay significantly more to outsource certain goods from foreign countries." While large corporations like McDonald's can manage, it's the small ones that get hit the hardest. According to the Brookline Chamber of Commerce, over 75% of small businesses in the area rely on at least one imported product. For those businesses, tariffs are not just an obstacle; they eat into profits that they cannot handle. Businesses that have been in the Brookline area for decades can be severely impacted, including removing products, laying off workers, and potentially even being forced to close.

There is more to this problem, so I will collect the necessary data to gain a deeper understanding of the tariff impacts. If we understand what is happening, we can aim to address the issue plaguing Brookline's local businesses. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Do the 3Cs (Cut, Color, Clarity) Really Impact the Overall Pricing of a Diamond?

-
Hello everyone!  My experience in the Coding School National High School Research Program has concluded, and I've completed my research on the impact of cut, color, clarity, and carat weight on a diamond's overall value. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to The Coding School and my mentor, Sujay Shetty, for all the fantastic guidance; your help made this possible. Why I Did This Project  I wanted to explore product pricing and how items could be priced based on their key characteristics. While I didn't immediately think diamonds would be my topic of choice, it became fascinating once I delved deep into the subject. My dataset, sourced from Kaggle, has over 50,000 entries, making EDA incredibly worthwhile for uncovering trends. As I delved deeper into the data, my curiosity only grew, and h ere's  what I discovered .  What I Found Using methods described in my paper, I found that around 90% of level changes for the 3Cs significantly affected price; however,...
Read more

My Response to a TED Talk by Mallory Freeman

-
Hello everyone! I recently watched a great Ted Talk by Mallory Freeman titled "Your company's data could help end world hunger." In it, she describes her experiences in optimizing trade routes to reduce food costs and, consequently, feed more people. How did she do this? She used data to build a model that identifies the optimal route for food. Freeman's accomplishments are built on data. Without it, she wouldn't be able to make a model to feed thousands more individuals. She is a firm believer that "information visibility drives efficiency." So she proposes three advancements that would benefit humanitarian organizations, tailored to how companies share and manage their internal data and analytics teams. Companies should: Share data with humanitarian organizations Lend their data scientists/decision scientists who can clean and model data Share their new innovations/technologies to allow for more data collection Freeman closes her talk discu...
Read more

Brookline Business Research | Part 2: The Data

-
Image
Hello people! Recently, I visited businesses in Brookline to better understand how policies are affecting them. I asked a wide range of local shops to better represent the diverse Brookline landscape, including restaurants (casual and sit-down), cafes, specialty stores, and supermarkets. While I cannot provide specific information about some of the businesses in my sample due to a desire to remain anonymous, what I have below is data worth looking into more deeply. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Data --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now What? I will delve deeper into my interpretation of this data in a future blog post. Analyzing this could help me understand the disparit...
Read more