The following is a recommendation from the Board of Directors of Monarch Books.
"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 because it is known for its wide selection of books on all subjects. Clearly, opening the café would attract more customers. Space could be made for the café by discontinuing the children's book section, which will probably become less popular given that the most recent national census indicated a significant decline in the percentage of the population under age ten. Opening a café will allow Monarch to attract more customers and better compete with Regal Books, which recently opened its own café."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation is likely to have the predicted result. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
The board of directors of Monarch Books has recently proposed to build an in-store café in order to attract more customers and to better compete with Regal Books. In order to make space for it however, they have proposed to replace the children’s books section because the population of the population under age 10 will decrease. However, there are several questions that must be answered before a plan like this seems reasonable.
First of all, the board says without any support that since a wide variety of book subjects are sold means that a café will attract more customers. Based off of the recommendation from the board alone, it is unclear what the customers actually want that will make them want to shop at Monarch Books. What if they want a wider variety of subjects? What if they want lower prices? The recommendation’s lack of any evidence to back up this reasoning makes it a very questionable one.
Secondly, just because there is a decline in the population of aged 10 children, it does not mean that there will be more customers. Perhaps there is also a decline in the number of adults who do not wish to pay for coffee outside of their home. Also, there could be a decline in the number of adult coffee drinkers. There could also be some children that are over the age of ten that would like to read children’s books as well. If so, then the board’s prediction will be incorrect. If a café replaced the children’s section with any of these factors occuring, the cost of building it and maintaining it will surly cost more than just leaving books in one spot even if these books do not sell very well.
Lastly, the recommendation says that building a café will help Monarch Books better compete with Regal Books which may not be the case. The board’s recommendation assumes that since Monarch Book’s competitor opened its own café, then so should it. However, what if Regal Books outcompetes Monarch Book’s café anways? It would be useful to know what would be different about the two cafes that would make customers prefer Monarch Book’s café over Regal Book’s café, such as an excellent signature brew. If customers would rather go to the café of the competetor’s, it will backfire on Monarch’s Book’s and they will instead lose customers that they intended on gaining.
In conclusion, the recommendation put forth by the board is flawed and requires a lot more evidence to corroborate it before such an expensive and time consuming action were to be executed.
Comments
Essay evaluation report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 20 15
No. of Words: 432 350
No. of Characters: 2009 1500
No. of Different Words: 202 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.559 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.65 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.524 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 120 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 96 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 60 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 37 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.6 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.019 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.9 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.318 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.557 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.153 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
actually, also, first, however, if, lastly, may, second, secondly, so, then, well, in conclusion, such as, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 17.0 19.6327345309 87% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 19.0 12.9520958084 147% => OK
Conjunction : 5.0 11.1786427146 45% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 13.0 13.6137724551 95% => OK
Pronoun: 33.0 28.8173652695 115% => OK
Preposition: 65.0 55.5748502994 117% => OK
Nominalization: 13.0 16.3942115768 79% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2134.0 2260.96107784 94% => OK
No of words: 432.0 441.139720559 98% => OK
Chars per words: 4.93981481481 5.12650576532 96% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.55901411391 4.56307096286 100% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.93127953143 2.78398813304 105% => OK
Unique words: 202.0 204.123752495 99% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.467592592593 0.468620217663 100% => OK
syllable_count: 653.4 705.55239521 93% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 7.0 8.76447105788 80% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 2.70958083832 111% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 4.22255489022 47% => More preposition wanted as sentence beginning.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 20.0 19.7664670659 101% => OK
Sentence length: 21.0 22.8473053892 92% => OK
Sentence length SD: 51.9119446756 57.8364921388 90% => OK
Chars per sentence: 106.7 119.503703932 89% => OK
Words per sentence: 21.6 23.324526521 93% => OK
Discourse Markers: 5.95 5.70786347227 104% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 9.0 8.20758483034 110% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 5.0 6.88822355289 73% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 6.0 4.67664670659 128% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.267313138191 0.218282227539 122% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0884284034162 0.0743258471296 119% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0870075253341 0.0701772020484 124% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.146239496761 0.128457276422 114% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0687468010443 0.0628817314937 109% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 12.6 14.3799401198 88% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 58.62 48.3550499002 121% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 10.3 12.197005988 84% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 11.37 12.5979740519 90% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.49 8.32208582834 90% => OK
difficult_words: 77.0 98.500998004 78% => More difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 13.5 12.3882235529 109% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.4 11.1389221557 93% => OK
text_standard: 11.0 11.9071856287 92% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.