[a习作temp] Argument117 【0710G-挑战极限小组大帖】by xiaomei [复制链接]

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发表于 2007-7-24 17:45:31 |只看该作者 |倒序浏览

ARGUMENT117 - The following is a memo from the business manager of Valu-Mart stores.
"Over 70 percent of the respondents to a recent survey reported that they are required to take more work home with them from the workplace than they were in the past. Since Valu-Mart has not seen impressive sales in its office-supply departments in the past, we should take advantage of this work-at-home trend by increasing at all Valu-Mart stores the stock of home office machines such as printers, small copy machines, paper shredders, and fax machines. We will also increase stock of office supplies such as paper, pens, and staplers. With these changes, our office-supply departments will become the most profitable component of our stores."

The work-at-home trend can be a potential market for the office-supply departments of Valu-Mart stores. However, there is no sufficient evidence to show that the manager’s conclusion is based on a reliable survey and the manager's conclusion is premature because of lacking consideration of other facts which influence the future sales and profits.

The first problem with the argument is that the survey cited by the business manager is too vague to be reliable. The manager only said over 70 percent of the respondents reported the increase of take home work, however, he didn't mention the total number of the survey. This 70 percent can be statistically significant if the amount of the respondents is over 200, whereas the percentage will be less significant if there were only 10 people who took the survey. Meanwhile, we cannot ensure whether the feedback of the survey is representative of overall circumstances. The survey neither provides the areas where it took nor gives the job background of the respondents. It is obvious that the people who live in big cities like New York or Chicago would have more pressure and more work to do than those live in small towns like Harrodsburg. Or, if the survey was specifically made to the office workers, it would be very likely to get the answer that they take more work home because they can finish it at home. But for the people with other jobs, the answer would be that they are required to work overtime instead. Without providing sufficient evidence to support the reliability of the survey, manager cannot make a convinced conclusion.

Another fallacy of the argument is that the manager made a groundless assumption that the take-home work relates to paper work. All the home office machines and office supplies mentioned in the argument like paper shredders, fax machines and staplers have to work with paper, but we cannot get any information about that from the survey. As known to all, the computer and Internet have been used widely and they make the none-paper work become true. People only need to save their home work as a file to disk or make it as an attachment of their e-mails. Besides, the manager neglected the different forms of take-home work. To the computer programmer, the work-at-home is to compose an unfinished program and to the employees of insurance company, their take home work can be just making phone calls to the clients. In order to make the assumption sound, the manager should inform the strong connection between the office supplies and take-home work.

Even if there are needs of office products, it is still no guarantee that the office-supply departments will be profitable due to the manager’s failure to analyze the various factors which may influence the sales or profit. First, the manager failed to exclude the influence of competition from other stores which may also cause the failure sales in the past. Compare to the specific office stores like Office Depot or Circuit City, Valu-Mart stores may be less competitive because most clients think they are not professional or less variety. Or, the sales amount may not increase after those changes for the reason that people now like to buy products from Internet, which they think is more convenient and interesting. Second, the manager didn’t evaluate the potential risks of the new strategy. The increase of stock means the increase of the cost, like the cost of goods, the labors expenses, the transportation fee, etc. So, it will be difficult for those departments to be profitable without a remarkable sales amount.

In sum, the conclusion that the office-supply departments will be the most profitable component is unconvincing, to support the argument, the manager need to prove the significance and representativeness of the survey and its necessity with the new strategy. To make the conclusion more reasonable, the manager also has to take an overall investigation of the potential market.

[ 本帖最后由 xiaomei07 于 2007-7-25 04:15 编辑 ]