From online to offline

Provide the following information to the interviewee if requested:

• We do not have the resources to hire more than 10 newspaper carriers on bicycles
• One carrier will have to distribute newspapers to all the houses in 1 square kilometer area within the city
• In order to meet customer requirements, the carriers will have to distribute all the newspapers in 3 hours

The candidate should ask questions regarding the background of the case.

Assumptions which the candidate can make:

• Kolkata is in the shape of a square and all the houses are evenly distributed and equidistant (10 meters) from each other
• All the non-residential areas should be ignored

To check the feasibility of the plan, let us calculate how quickly the newspaper carrier will have to deliver a newspaper.

Each side of the area will contain 1000m/10m or 100 houses. Therefore, in total, a carrier will have to distribute newspapers to a total of 100*100 or 10,000 houses.

But since a single carrier only has 3 hours or 10,800 (3*60*60) seconds, he will have to distribute one newspaper in 10,000/10,800 seconds.

The plan seems infeasible as delivering a newspaper in less than a second is nearly impossible.

In such a scenario hiring more newspaper carriers should be the best alternative; but since we have budget constraints, we could consider the following:

• Reduce distribution area
• Change distribution method

It is an infeasible plan as it is impossible to deliver more than one newspaper in a second. The client should consider reducing the distribution area or changing the distribution method for the plan to become feasible.