The following is a recommendation from the Board of Directors of Monarch Books.Prompt:"We recommend that Monarch Books open a café in its store. Monarch, having been in business at the same location for more than twenty years, has a large customer base be

The directors of the Monark Books(MB) recommend that they should open a café in their store in order to attract more customers, even though they have already had large customers base for 20 years. To justify this recommendation the directors point out that they can make space for café with discontinuing children's section inasmuch as the national census shows a decline in children population under age ten, and that in this way they are able to compete better with Regal Books(RB) whose café was recently opened. Close scrutiny of each of these evidence, however, reveals that none of them lend credible support to the recommendation.

To begin with, the argument relies on what might be a poor analogy between Regan Books and Monark Books. Customers of MB might be less interested in opening the café that customers of RB. Given that they have been the loyal patrons of the store for very long time, in all likelihood they prefer the current atmosphere of the store; opening a café could disturb the congenial environment of the store since large crowds may just gathered there for relaxation and not buying books, and as a result this changeover can cause the store will loses its valued customers. Or perhaps RB owes it success to factors unrelated to opening a café; it might offers books with reasonable discounts, or it might favor better salesmen who give valuable advice on buying a right book for a given purpose. Furthermore, the location of the two stores should be taken into consideration in that RB may be located near a university or a college while MB might not, thereby not being provided with genuine customers who interested in buying books. Thus, I would need to know these and other factors that might be responsible for RB's success before I can either accept or reject the proposed recommendation.

As for making decision based on a national census, the argument fails to consider that a national census might not be representative of the MB's city-trends as a whole, especially if the latter group constitutes a small percentage of the larger group. Perhaps the MB's city is not suffered from small population of children since the traditional values in the city's families which dictate a large number of children for every family. The recommendation also assumes that all conditions bearing on citizenry will remain unchanged in the foreseeable future; it is possible that in near future a demographic shift toward the city, for whatever reason, would cause the population of children will increase dramatically. Accordingly, in order to determine whether the children's population will decline in the city, the directors would need to use a better statistical data on the current and future trends of their city.

Even if the foregoing evidences turn out to be substantiate the recommendation, it is unfair to assume that MB would thrive without any need to children's book section. Common sense informs that children are not the only one who are in favor with children books. It is entirely possible that the adults could be more interested in children's books due to many factors, including being filled by nostalgia for their childhood or being a would-be parent who wants to be prepared. After all, MB has been known for its wide selection of books and terminating one of these ranges, such as children's books, would not seem a sound advice. For that matter, banning the children's section and opening a café could be counterproductive in that it violates the customer's preferences. Therefore, without ruling out these and other reasons why MB might not benefit the opening the café, the directors cannot convince me that the recommendation would be profitable for MB.

In sum, the argument is a dubious one that relies on what might amount to weak analogy between two stores, as well as sweeping prediction based on a national census indicated a gradual decline in children's population. As a result, without additional information indicated above, I find the argument unconvincing at best.