"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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

The argument states that after a change in the ingredients of pancakes little complaints have been made. Beside the possible explanation mentioned in the argument some other factors could explain the observations properly.

An alternative explanation could be that people do not tend to complain too much. Usually when people go to a restaurant with their friends or family, in the first place, they would like to enjoy their time and stay away from the problems they experience during the day. Hence, in the case that the change in quality is minor, customers do not ruin their joy by complaining and arguing with the servers or the manager. Furthermore, many still believe that complaints might not be as effective as they should be and hence refuse to complain.

Another explanation is that if the change has been made recently, perhaps many people think that a mistake has occurred and will not happen again. Many of such mistakes happen in the restaurants every day, as a result, supposing that the case is an exception they do not take it seriously. Besides, when one is a permanent customer of a restaurant they don't like to bother the manager the first time they see the quality has changed. Thus, if not enough time has passed after the change, this could be a potential reason for the few number of complaints.

Another factor responsible for the small number of complaints is probably the ingredients used in the pancakes. We all have the experience that when a combination of ingredients is used together, some of them take away the effects of the others such as smell, taste, etc. In this case, maybe another ingredient that has a strong smell or taste is mixed with butter or margarine. Consequently, it becomes really hard to distinguish of the two has been used and it does not mean that customers cannot distinguish between margarine and butter separately or even prefer margarine to butter.