The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants."Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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 im

Essay topics:

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"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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

The author of this proposal to replacement of butter by margarine in Happy pancake House restaurants offers an interesting argument but to move forward on the proposal would definitely require more information and thought. While correlations stated are logical and probable, there are many hidden factors that prevent this new change in this project.

First the argument assumes that replacement of butter will not affect any customer. But, survey responses can hardly be used as indicator of actual behavior. Even the wording of the survey results remains ambiguous and vague. While everybody understands what the butter tastes and what food goes with butter, this allows for many other favorites. What remains unknown is the importance of margarine. Does the customer really like margarine above butter? Indeed the survey hardly provides enough information to discern future use of improved facilities.

Second, The argument never addresses the idea behind a margarine will result in increased sale. While it is not illogical to expect some increase, at what level will people begin to like margarine? The answer to this question requires a survey to find out the reasons the customers like or does not like the margarine. Happy Pancake House restaurants needs to survey is there any side effect to use margarine in food instead of butter or what are fat, protein percentages in margarine? These type of question will influence the restaurants manager forecast how they will grow their business and attract different customers from different location.

Likewise, the argument omits the idea behind use of margarine in food. As we can see the manager never explains why they will use margarine and what percent of price will increase in usage of margarine instead of butter. Sometimes customer does not understand or realize what the purpose of using margarine is and they do not differentiate butter from margarine. The manager does not consider this type of situation and he naively assumes that sale can simply increase without forethought on where it will come from.

Thus, the argument is not completely sound. Examining all the various angles and factors involved with usage of margarine in happy pancake restaurants, the argument does not sound good. However, this author’s argument is not likely significantly persuading replacement of butter to allocate increased sale. While proposal does highlight a possibility, more information is required to know the reason behind this change. Ultimately the argument might have been strengthened if the author could have shown that good or bad effects of this activity and also customer satisfaction of this project.

Votes
Average: 3 (1 vote)
Essay Categories

Comments

flaws:
The essay is out of topic. didn't argue properly.

Read a sample:
http://www.testbig.com/gmatgre-essays/butter-has-now-been-replaced-marg…

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: ? out of 6
Category: ? Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 23 15
No. of Words: 422 350
No. of Characters: 2207 1500
No. of Different Words: 206 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.532 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.23 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.649 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 175 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 131 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 95 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 59 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 18.348 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.142 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.565 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.311 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.504 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.074 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5