In 2021, Purell Hand Sanitizer’s maker, Gojo Industries, had expanded their operations in anticipation that consumers would continue to remain engaged with the then recently adopted hygiene habits that had become the center of American life during the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, many companies and brands in the industry soon followed with this same production strategy, all of whom assumed that the silver lining out of the pandemic would be that number of Americans who adopted healthy hygiene behaviors would continue to grow into the future. While we have now made great progress in combating against one of the worst global pandemics in recent history, we now have a new threat on the horizon: global inflationary pressures combined with a probable global recession.After central banks around the world began to take action by either raising or lowering interest rates, the dollar index hit a near 40-year high, which has resulted, and continues to contribute to, an increase in the cost of operations and logistics of goods around the world. Thus, Gojo faces quite the double-edged sword, and must choose only one of the following two alternatives moving forward:
• Expand operations and logistics, consumer demand for Purell will go up due to long-term changes in consumer habits of hand sanitizer due to the pandemic. OR
• Scale-back operations, the inflationary pressures and economic uncertainty loom on the horizon, possibly making expansion of production and logistics, in general, more costly.
In this task, make an informed recommendation to Gojo. You will need to select which alternative you recommend and justify why your recommended alternative should be undertaken, and why the opposite choice should not. You are free to use any method of analysis (exploration, explanation, prediction, visualization, analytical modeling, simulation, etc) and any tool (R, Python, SQL, etc).