Argument 7

In the recommendation, the author concludes that opening a café in the Monarch Books store could
allow Monarch to attract more customers and compete with Regal Books, which opened a café. To
justify this recommendation, the author points out that opening this café would attract more
customers. Discounting the children’s book section would probably decline the population under age
ten and have an opportunity to mimic, compete, or even exceed to Regal Books. Although his
argument seems to be convincing at first glance, several questions regarding his lines of reasoning
need to be further analyzed. From the answers to those questions, the argument may end up being
quite cogent or completely fallacious.

The first serious questions I am going to put forward revolve around the increasing number of
customers. If Monarch Books open its café, will many people choose to come here, and will they
routinely come in the long run? If the answer to such questions is definite, then the customer flow
volume of this café is possibly on the rise. On the contrary, we cannot deny that many people are more
likely to buy a coffee as near as possible to their communities and companies in the early morning.
Meanwhile, a good taste of coffee is really attractive for customers to buy-back, as they are getting
used to and favor in that taste. Therefore, for the first serious questions, opening the café may attract
some customers, but how huge the population is hard to estimate and make sure.

The severe second question I will further analyze is that the author’s reasoning relies heavily on the
children’s book section. At the same time, he ignores some flaws in cutting out children’s book
section, instead of choosing to open the café there. We can easily imagine that while deleting the
children’s book section, some parents will not bring their children. Naturally, some customers like
children, parents, and older people may decrease in Monarch Books. Barring the number of
customers, will the children’s book section become less popular recently? How reliable is the national
census? The population participated in the aged groups, the specific cities, and so on. These are all
reasonable doubts. Even though it shows a significant decline in the percentage of the population
under age ten, potentially other children who are older than ten years old may still quite interested in
reading.

Even if all of these two serious questions are solved, we still need to raise a couple of questions,
whose answers might confirm the causal relationship between Monarch Books and Regal Books. Are
they open in similar localities, own similar size, provide similar services, and operate similar systems,
and so on? These differences are unknown for us, and thus it cannot prove that the success of Regal
Books can represent the success of Monarch Books simultaneously.

In conclusion, only after the questions, as mentioned above, are adequately addressed, can we
effectively evaluate the author’s argument and reach a logically sound conclusion.