The following appeared in a memorandum from the owner of the Juniper Cafe,a small, local coffee shop in the downtown area of a small American city:"We must reduce overhead here at the cafe. Instead of opening at 6 a.m. weekdays,we will now open at 8 a.m. On weekends, we will only be open from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. The decrease in hours of operations will help save money because we won't be paying for utilities, employee wages, or other operating costs during the hours we are closed. This is the best strategy for us to save money and remain in business without having to eliminate jobs."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to assess the reasonableness of both the prediction and the argument upon which it is based. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the prediction.
The argument that the best strategy for the Juniper Cafe to save money is reducing the overhead by reducing the number of working hours especially in the weekends is not completely convincing. This lack of cogent is a result of ignoring many assumptions and of use of poor vocabulary.
Firstly, The argument assumes that less working hours means less expenditure which must not be necessarily true. On the contrary, the opposite may be true. How can the author guarantee that clients will not come in these hours in which the cafe is closed? Is there any study that shows the number of cafe visitors in each hour along the day? Is there a poll that asks the clients which time they prefer to visit the cafe? Isn't there a possibility that some clients would come early to take their morning tea or their breakfast in that early hour?
Secondly, The argument claimed that in weekends the number of working hours will be further reduced to increase the income. However, it may be possible that more visitors would like to visit the cafe in their weekends. This special reduction of working hours in weekends may result in decrease of the income rather than saving money.
Finally, the argument suffers from poor vocabulary as the author used the word "best" describing this strategy of reducing hours to save money. There is no any proof that this strategy is the best one. On what premises the author concluded that this strategy is "best" or even better than other strategies like the one already mentioned in the argument "eliminating jobs"?. How can the author tell that the reason for low profit in the cafe is the high number of working hours? The reason could be bad service, or bad quality of beverages.
Ultimately, the argument does not completely sound good. The evidence in support of the conclusion that decreasing the number of working hours will help save money does little to prove that conclusion. The argument could have been strengthened if the author has made a study about the number of cafe visitors along the day hours, has made a study about the number of visitors along the week days and compared that number in weekends and in other days, has proved that this strategy is truly the "best" one.
| Post date | Users | Rates | Link to Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-08-23 | mohamedabdelhakim | 63 | view |
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 19 15
No. of Words: 387 350
No. of Characters: 1790 1500
No. of Different Words: 163 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.435 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.625 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.305 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 111 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 83 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 59 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 24 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 20.368 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.281 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.368 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.326 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.543 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.072 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5