The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants Recently butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States This change however has had little impact

The argument concludes that when Happy Pancake House replaced butter with margarine in their restaurants in the Southwest, there was no effect on their customers. To support this claim, they point to the fact that only 2 percent of customers have complained about the change and that many servers say customers do not complain when given margarine instead of butter. The author also assumes that customers generally fail to distinguish margarine from butter or use the term ‘butter’ to refer to both. However, their conclusions do not follow from the evidence presented.

The author claims that only 2 percent of customers complained, and this indicates 98 out of 100 people are satisfied. First of all, the statistic itself is suspect. Where does the 2 percent come from? Perhaps they estimated their total number of monthly customers based on sales figures and then divided their total number of monthly complaints by that number, but readers can only guess. What if customers tend to only complain the second time an error has happened? Depending on how the statistic was calculated, this could mean that it only represents half the extent of customer dissatisfaction.

Second of all, even assuming the statistic is accurate, their assumption that 98 out of 100 people must then be happy does not logically follow. Some costumers may not voice their dissatisfaction—perhaps the company’s protocol for filing complaints is too inconvenient for most customers, or perhaps dissatisfied customers stop dining at the restaurant altogether. Hence there are many possible scenarios in which complaint statistics do not accurately reflect the actual situation. The author could strengthen their argument by giving further details of how they arrived at the 2 percent statistic and why it is a valid measure of overall customer satisfaction.

The second piece of data used in the author’s argument is even worse. Dispensing with numbers altogether, they put forward a weakly worded claim that “many servers” reported “a number of customers” do not complain when given margarine after asking for butter. The errors here are essentially the same as those in the preceding discussion, just more severe. To begin with, how many data points were used? What constitutes “many” servers? The sample size was likely too small to generate a valid statistic, so instead, we are left with this nebulous phrasing. Perhaps only a handful of servers in a couple of restaurants reported this, we can’t know. Maybe they only looked for feedback in poorly performing restaurants where customer expectations were relatively low. Again, we cannot know.

In conclusion, customer complaints can be a useful form of feedback, but the author fails to use them reasonably in their argument. Eliminating butter from their restaurants may very well be an effective long-term business strategy for Happy Pancake House. However, the pieces of data provided are not persuasive enough to advise that course of action.