Levi Strauss & Co. has been making jeans since 1853. Today, it manufactures different types of jeans for different market segments. For example, Wal-Mart sells Levi Strauss’s Signature brand of jeans for about $15 less than department stores sell the company’s Levi’s brand. Visit the Levi Strauss website to learn more about the company’s brands.

What value-adding production and nonproduction activities do you think might account for the higher price of the Levi’s brand? Which of these activities do you think Levi Strauss would eliminate for the less costly Signature brand? (By visiting the website, you can also discover what Levi Strauss called jeans when it first sold them 150 years ago, as well as the year in which the company officially changed the name to “jeans.”)