James Banks was standing in line next to Robin Cole at Klecko's Copy Center, waiting to use one of the copy machines.
"Gee, Robin, I hate this," he said. "We have to drive all the way over here from Southgate and then wait in line to use these copy machines. I hate wasting time like this."
"I know what you mean," said Robin. "And look who's here. A lot of these students are from Southgate Apartments or one of the other apartments near us. It seems as though it would be more logical if Klecko's would move its operation over to us, instead of all of us coming over here." James looked around and noticed what Robin was talking about. Robin and he were students at State University, and most of the customers at Klecko's were also students.
As Robin suggested, a lot of the people waiting were State students who lived at Southgate Apartments, where James also lived with Ernie Moore. This gave James an idea, which he shared with Ernie and their friend Terri Jones when he got home later that evening.
"Look, you guys, I've got an idea to make some money," James started. "Let's open a copy business! All we have to do is buy a copier, put it in Terri's duplex next door, and sell copies. I know we can get customers because I've just seen them all at Klecko's. If we provide a copy service right here in the Southgate complex, we'll make a killing."
Finally, they needed to estimate how much business they would lose while the copier was waiting for repair. The three of them had only a vague idea of how much business they would do but finally estimated that they would sell between 2,000 and 8,000 copies per day at $0.10 per copy. However, they had no idea about what kind of probability distribution to use for this range of values. Therefore, they decided to use a uniform probability distribution between 2,000 and 8,000 copies to estimate the number of copies they would sell per day.
James, Ernie, and Terri decided that if their loss of revenue due to machine downtime during 1 year was $12,000 or more, they should purchase a backup copier. Thus, they needed to simulate the breakdown and repair process for a number of years to obtain an average annual loss of revenue.
However, before programming the simulation model, they decided to conduct a manual simulation of this process for 1 year to see if the model was working correctly. Perform this manual simulation for JET Copies and determine the loss of revenue for 1 year.