Required information

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Davis Stores sells clothing in 15 stores located around the southwestern United States. The managers at Davis are considering expanding by opening new stores and are interested in estimating costs in potential new locations. They believe that costs are driven in large part by store volume measured by revenue. During a discussion, one of the managers suggests that number of employees might be better at explaining cost than store revenues. As a result of that suggestion, managers collected the following information from last years operations (revenues and costs in thousands of dollars):

Store		Costs		Employees		Revenues
101	$	4,214		39	$	4,100
102		2,894		29		2,227
103		5,181		47		5,738
104		3,998		38		3,982
105		3,676		33		2,914
106		3,319		38		4,023
107		5,029		54		6,894
108		2,374		26		1,779
109		4,688		44		5,416
110		2,959		35		3,228
111		4,179		37		3,886
112		3,200		41		4,690
113		2,556		35		3,552
114		4,655		42		4,817
115		2,986		28		2,124

Required

a. Use the high-low method to estimate the fixed and variable portions of store costs based on employees. (Do not round your intermediate calculation. Negative amounts should be indicated by a minus sign. Round your answer to the nearest whole number (in thousands of dollars).)

Variable cost (per employee) $

Fixed cost $