Hannah Nicole R.

Valentin
BS-IE

The Hudsucker Proxy was a film in 1994, that revolved around the story of a young
fresh-grad business student, Nerville Barnes, who was trying to make it in the big city of New
York. He started his journey looking for possible jobs in the city but was not successful in doing
so because he lacked in experience in the business and was new to the city since he came from
Indiana. His first job in the big city was as a mailroom clerk at Hudsucker Industries where he
will soon find his foot in the business world. In an unexpected turn of events, Norville was
thrusted headfirst into the position as the proxy president of the company where he was
expected by the board of executives to be the cause of depression in terms of stocks of the
company but the opposite had happened. After assuming the position as the president of the
company, Norville had increased the value of the stocks of Hudsucker Industries.

There had been a lot of things that had happened to Norville which led him to his
position in the company: his pitch of the “hula hoop”, how Mussburger took advantage of his
lack of experience and how they planned on bullying him into making bad decisions for the
company. Mussbuger along with the other members of the board of directors planned on hiring
someone that was inexperienced and was easily swayed to do their bidding and had no clue as
to what his role was in the company so that the stocks of the company would plumet and would
give him a chance to buy out the controlling shares of the late president. They all expected
Norville to make inexperienced decisions and create projects that would cost the company
money so that it would decrease in value but Norville’s hula hoop idea only brought in more
money for the company. But Norville’s success with the hula hoop was only a mere accident
because of a single child on the street which had picked up the disposed hula hoop which was
meant to be discontinued and in turn created a craze for the hula hoops which also increased
the demand of the product that led to more sales. His pitched project was easily approved
because the board of directors wanted Norville to fail and he actually did fail in the early stages
of promoting his hula hoop even though they dropped the prices of the hula hoop and even tried
giving it away for free it still wasn’t enough to convince the public of its value because it wasn’t
really what the people wanted at that time and it was a relevantly new product which meant
there was no existing demand for it.

Further down the road when the hula hoop rode out its success and was a booming
business for Hudsucker Inc. they increased their production or supply of the product because
there was a drastic increase in the demand from all the children wanting to get a hand on a
hula hoop. In relation to the concepts of Demand and Supply, the films comedic portrayal of how
the hula hoop came to be a highly demanded product and in some ways is accurate, it shows us
the relationship between the prices and the quantity output of a certain product. When the hula
hoop was not selling that well, the prices only plummeted but when there was an increase in the
demand the company also took advantage and increased their production and prices to gain
more profit.