The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants."Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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

The business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants claims that the transition from using butter to margarine caused little to no impact on their customers in Southwestern United States. To support this assertion, he/she pointed out that only 2 out of 100 people reported complaint regarding the change, suggesting that it implies the rest of customers are happy with the change. Moreover, manager mentioned testimonials from servers suggesting a number of customers asked for butter but given margarine did not complain, thus they cannot distinguish butter from margarine. However, the memorandum is unconvincing in several respects as the arguer fails to establish logical link between the new change and the response from customers.

The manager suggested that only 2 percent of clients complained about the change. Still, the connection between percentage of customers complained and ratio of people who are satisfied with the transition is not plausible. The remaining 98 percent of clients might be unhappy with the change but too busy with their daily routine to complain about a pancake. It is also possible that Happy Pancake House restaurants in southwestern United states did not have a system to collect complaints from customers, making it hard for their visitors to convey complaints to the manager. Thus, it is too hasty for the manager to conclude that the rest 98 percent of customers are happy with the alteration.

Moreover, the manager asserted that many servers have reported that customers did not complain when they are given margarine instead of butter which is they requested. Nevertheless, the argument makes no mention of the number of servers he contacted and the representativeness of them. It is possible that the arguer only made several phone calls to servers he personally knows to make his judgement. The argument is unjustified until the manager prove that the servers were from various branches of the restaurant and the number of the servers reported was large enough.

Another lacuna of this argument is that the manager concluded that customers cannot discern between butter or margarine. It is likely that the clients noticed the difference but just did not complain about it. Not every customers make complaints when they do not favor the flavor of the food in the restaurants. Many of them might rather not visit the place again than willingly pointing out the problem.

Margarine and butter contain quite similar taste making them traditional alternatives with each other. Therefore, it is possible that the change had little impact on the restaurants' customers like the arguer suggested. However, the arguer's opinion is inadequately supported due to lack of concrete logic.