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This week, the lecture we were tasked with listening to or watching is Burt Folsom’s speech on the Myth of the Robber Barons. Many interesting developments and breakthroughs within business occurring throughout the course of American history were discussed within this presentation, but the one of them that stuck out to me most was the segment of his speech discussing the Vanderbilt steam boat vs Collins’ method of business and how its subsidization. Collins’ steam powered ships would transport passengers back and forth between the United States and other countries from primarily Europe and areas surrounding the continent. Folsom stated that Collins’ company was subsidized by the United States government for an amount of seven hundred thousand dollars. His business ran like this for a considerable amount of time before the arrival of Vanderbilt’s steam boat, quite humorously named “The Vanderbilt.” As Vanderbilt and his business began to take shape, his business methods were formed and shaped in order to better save money and generate higher profits. Burt Folsom said that, in order to minimize costs and maximize profits, Vanderbilt was able to come up with many interesting and innovative ideas and practices that he then put into place when conducting business with his steam boats. Some of the methods he used included, as spoke about by Folsom, traveling on the steam boats much slower than normal in order to reduce fuel consumption, hiring teenagers to sell tickets and pay them based on the amount of ticket sales they gather, and creating what is essentially an economy class on board his ships in order to maximize the amount of passengers he could fit into a singular ship, and discounting ticket prices on this new economy in order to attract greater amounts of people to board his ship. These methods and more allowed for Vanderbilt to grow his business into a greatly profitable one and it worked to make Collins’ company less profitable and it even required him to approach congress with a need to up his stipend from the original seven hundred thousand dollars to a significantly higher amount of 858 thousand dollars. Collins had become too comfortable and reliant upon government assistance that when presented with other companies that focused more on profit maximization, his business was forced into the ground.