The Consumer Education Committee is assigned the duties of keeping informed of the qualities of all consumer goods and services, especially of their strengths and shortcomings, of gathering all pertinent information on dealers’ sales practices, with emphasis on practices involving honest and reasonable fairness, and of publicizing any of the information collected that may be helpful in educating the consumer. As you will not get this part of Medicare automatically, even if you are covered by Social Security, you must sign up for it and pay $88.50 per month, which the government will match, if you want your physician’s bills to be covered. Given our discussion yesterday, I have decided that you may choose either to take the final exam or to have the paper for which you received your highest grade count as an additional 15 percent of your course grade, but you must let me know in writing by May 15 which option you prefer. Although we have not definitely determined the causes for the decline in sales volume for the month, we know that during this period construction on the street adjacent to the store severely limited traffic flow and that because of resignations in the advertising department promotion efforts dropped well below normal. The upswing in business activity that began in 2012 is expected to continue and possibly accelerate in 2013, and gross domestic product should rise by $542 billion, representing a 4 percent increase, which is significantly higher than the modest 1 percent increase of 2011.
