The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake Houserestaurants."Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little imp

The author of the statement believes that customers of the Happy Pancake House do not differentiate butter from margarine or they use the same word “butter” to refer to both of them. This conclusion rests on the premise that when Happy pancake House restaurant shifted to use of margarine instead of butter seemingly most of the customers were comfortable with the change and they did not issued significant numbers of complaints. As the argument lacks firm evidence, the argument is open to different explanations.

First, the author relies on the lack of complaints to buttress the conclusion. There is not any guarantee that remaining 98 percent of customers who did not complain were satisfied with the change. It is possible that they abandoned the Happy Pancake for the other restaurants without bothering themselves with trivial things to issue any complaints. Furthermore, we do not know how much time pasts since the change happened. The change might happen a day ago, and still there are surges of complaints to come and it is just a matter of time that complaints be issued toward the Happy Pancake restaurant. Therefore, it would be too hasty to conclude that the impacts of the shift to margarine was not high.

Secondly, the author mentions that “many” servers reported that “a number” of customers asked for the butter did not complain when they received the margarine instead. Here the both words_ many servers and a number of customers_ are too vague to be statistically reliable. Many servers can be 10 out of a thousand of servers which equals to 1 percent of the servers which in turn would not be significant in numbers. Furthermore, “a number” of the costumers who did not complained might be 2 people while those who complained might be much more.

Finally, even if people are not making complaints this does not mean necessarily that they cannot recognize the difference between margarine and butter. These people might acquiesce to the change, and just tolerate the change because of the other options that such restaurant possesses, like being in the vicinity, offering cheaper prices, or better quality of food, and so on, the customers tolerate the change despite their reluctance toward such a change.

In short, as discussed, the argument lacks several vital evidences to support the argument and its conclusion; the rival explanations are not ruled out and thus the argument lacks any certainty to offer for readers. Therefore, the conclusion which is based on such a weak argument cannot be tenable.