A domestic fast food chain could use the Exponential Smoothing method to determine how the economic struggles of the world have impacted the fast food industry. They could look at the sales trends for the last several years and how that compares to the sales trends of the last year or so depending on how in depth they want to view the data. The market will rebound so they may want to view details for several years before the current economic issues arose in order to determine a strategy for both normal or more common times and times that are difficult. The Exponential Smoothing method will give more weight to the more recent changes due to the actual change verses random fluctuation of the market (Taylor III, B., 2011, p 689).