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15. The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants.
"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine."
Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
In the memorandum, the manager believes that the change of butter to margarine has had little impact on customers throughout southwestern United States. To support the conclusion, he cites the following as evidence: (1) only about 2 percent of customers have complained about the change; (2) a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. The argument seems to be well-presented and reasonable at first glance; however, I am afraid it can hardly bear further consideration because there might be multiple explanations to the evidence.
First and foremost, it is hasty for author to cite the result of the survey that only 2 percent of customers have complained about the change as convincible evidence without further scrutiny. It is not surprising that in different regions, people have different tastes about the food, which means it is not likely that substituting margarine to butter will win such widely supports throughout the whole southwestern region. In addition to this, neither does the report of complaining provide specific information to answer where did the report come from or is the respondents in the survey representative enough to stand all customers, nor it reveals the differences tastes among regions. Before a conclusion, the author should provide more information to answer the questions in order to make the evidence convincible.
Furthermore, even though the data of complaining can stand the feelings of customers in somehow, the author should not deduce that 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change only by that 2 percent of customers have complained. Many customers do not bother to complain about such little things to the restaurant. For example, to many office workers, they will not take too much care of the change for that having dinner in the restaurant is just a rest from a day's job. If they do not feel satisfied about the margarine, more likely they will just change to another restaurant rather than complain and wait for feedbacks. Moreover, use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine also can hardly be a sound evidence to prove that customers do not distinguish them. What more likely is that people call the margarine 'butter' because they have the same function in the food; or in other words, they just get used to call 'butter' for butter and something like butter. So, in order to find out the real feeling about the customers, the manager should use statistical methods such as random survey among customers.
To sum up, after pointing out so many obvious flaws in the argument, we can say that the evidence cited by the manager cannot support the argument sufficiently. Before reaching a final conclusion, the author should conduct surveys to assess the customers' real feelings about the change and make comprehensive investigation on the differences between the tastes of varietal regions. |
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发表于 2012-10-29 16:18:35
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