The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants."Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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

Although the argument provides a number of explanations to the results after replacing butter by margarine, these explanations, however, are not the only ones that could make sense of the situation.

The author drew the conclusion that "an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change" from the fact that "about 2 percent of customers have complained". The transition from the complaint rate to the author's conclusion is dubious. The complaint rate only means that 2 percent of the customers complained are thus are unsatisfied about this change. It does not, however, give convincing indication about how the rest 98 percent of customers feel. Perhaps they are quite happy with the change as suggested by the author. Yet it could well turn out be the case, for example, that many of them are not pleased with the change but they just did not decide to complain. If that is the case, an alternative explanation for the complaint rate is that more than 2 percent of customers are unhappy with the change but only 2 percent made complaints.

Another argument in the article is that the reason why certain customers do not explain when they ask for butter but get margarine instead is that they either cannot distinguish the two or they use the term 'butter' for both products. This explanation seems thorough at first glance, but if we look more closely we can find other possibilities similar to the alternative explanation offered in the last paragraph. One such explanation would be that they know the difference between butter and margarine and do not use the same term for the two, and they may be dissatisfied when they get margarine for butter, but they just decide not to complain. These customers may have received similar treatments in other restaurants and made futile complaints and thus may think that such complaints will not do any good. Another possible explanation is that such costumers know the difference between the two products but they might not notice it at first. They just think that if they ask for butter, they get butter. When they finally realize what they have, they might figure that it is just a mistake made by the server and do not make much of it.

As discussed above, a number of plausible alternative explanations exist to account for the facts presented in the article. If the author wishes to strengthen his conclusion that this change has little impact on the customers, he needs to refute all the explanations mentioned above and other possible ways that can both make sense of the facts and indicate a significant influence of this change on the customers.