Larry owns a boutique that makes lamp bases and lampshades. It takes one hour to assemble and wire one lamp base and one hour to assemble and paint one lampshade. Larry works six hours per day and makes identical numbers of bases and shades. What is the constraint?

• A. The price of lamps
• B. The number of lamp bases
• C. The number of hours Larry works per day
• D. The color options

Answer: (C)

In production problems, the limiting factor is a scarce resource. Here, the resource is time: each lamp base takes one hour to assemble and wire, and each lampshade takes one hour to assemble and paint. Larry can work six hours each day, so the total amount of work he can perform daily is fixed at six hours. Since he is producing equal numbers of bases and shades, the number of complete lamps he can finish in a day is directly limited by those six hours. This makes the available work time the binding constraint. Price, color options, or simply how many bases exist aren’t specified as limiting factors here, so they don’t constrain daily output under the given information.