Score My Argument and Issue Task Please

[yagneezy]

Argument:

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 recommendation to open a cafe at Monarch Books rests upon many assumptions which the Board of Directors have failed to address. Namely these assumptions are the decrease in children under the age of ten being proportional to the decrease in this age group consuming children’s books. Whether the profits from the cafe have been projected to cover or overtake the loss in sales of children’s books has also not been taken into account. These assumption as well as the assumption of outcompeting Regal Book’s cafe make this recommendation invalid.

    The profits of children’s books was never stated in the recommendation, which is worrisome because children’s books not only bring in younger customers, but simultaneously plant the roots for future consumption of books in general. With less children associating books with the name Monarch, the company may lose the possibility of gaining these customers when they are reading at levels beyond that of children’s books. This loss in future customers also comes at the expense of not researching whether the decline in children under the age of ten is directly proportional to a decrease in the number of young readers. Perhaps children today are encouraged to read more than previous generations, which would increase the percentage and therefore the number of children readers.

    The argument that less children means less readers would hold if the Board looked more into whether this in fact shows that the customer base for children readers has shrank. This would then make it much more plausible to open up cafe there inviting more adults in who buy coffee and books. Yet the Board failed to do so, which makes green lighting the project a possible loss in sales today and in the future as well. In addition, even if there are less children reading today, it was not stated whether the amount of revenue from the cafe would cover the loss in profits from children’s books.

    The fact that Regal Books opened up a coffee shop, is not a justification for Monarch to do so as well, primarily because this competition will make it even more difficult to make up for the revenue lost from removing the children’s book section. This matter can be compounded even more if Regal Books did not remove its children’s books section for several reasons. Namely that now parents can go get coffee and buy their children’s books from Regal Books, whereas Monarch books looks much less appealing to this demographic for its lack of a children’s books section. Not only will profit from coffee and children’s books be lost, but perhaps sales from other books and items that the parents would in fact stumble upon and buy for themselves. 

    If it can be shown that Regal Books has in fact removed its children’s section as well, then the case for doing the same would be more plausible. Nonetheless, even in this instance it may not be logical to do the exact same thing for we would be competing in a market that already exists, whereas currently Monarch is the place to buy children’s books which has been shown to bring in parents who will buy items for their children and themselves. Letting go of this monopoly on children’s books would then seem even more unfeasible, especially to do so to enter a the market of cafes, which are so numerous that Regal Books would be the least of our competitive concerns.

    The idea that entering the cafe industry on the basis that Regal has done so, does not justify leaving the children’s books market namely because of correlative date of less children under the age of ten. The Board’s ludicrous business proposals has many unanswered questions, which even if addressed rely on a myriad of assumption that beg even more questions.

 

Issue:

The surest indicator of a great nation is represented not by the achievements of its rulers, artists, or scientists, but by the general welfare of its people.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

    Nations compete for a place in the history books to be remembered as the home of glorious individuals, yet in that competition it forgets that it will not be called great for the achievements of these historical figures. The glory of nations must be evaluated on the basis of the prosperity of the everyday citizen’s ability to feed, shelter, and provide for one’s family. The welfare of a nation’s citizens as a whole is the determining factor of its greatness, whereas the achievements of the individual citizens within a nation are negligible.

    The nation is a construct which can be portrayed to its citizens and to other countries as great for many different reasons, but this portrayal may not represent the realities that citizens face in their daily lives. For example you can have a nation such as Libya before its revolution where many people lived oppressed lives and in poverty, but its ruler Gadhafi lived a life of luxury. Surely it can’t be said that such a nation is great while many of its people are starving and living without basic human rights because of its wealthy ruler. The welfare of its people comes first, and no matter how much the ruler is represented as the icon of the nation’s greatness, such a nation will always have the underlying possibility of being overthrown as was shown in Libya and many other nation’s in the Middle East.

    The achievements of artists and and scientists who reside within a nation being a reflection of its greatness is simply a fallacious idea. The work of scientists and artists are one that usually are enjoyed by people of the world alike. If not, in the case of the scientist they are usually weapons, and in the case of the artist are mere propaganda. This may cause those in power or even perhaps the citizens themselves to look upon their nation with greatness, however objectively in the eyes of the world this type of nation is a destructive force that is unaware of its negative impact on humanity as a whole.

    The concession must be made that there have been individual leaders, artists, and scientists within nations that have been symbolic representations of a nation’s greatness such as Ghandi, Picasso and Thomas Edison. Nonetheless, these individuals represent the greatness of their nations in terms of how they improved the general welfare of the citizens, not for their achievements in politics, science or the arts. Individuals such as Hitler or Stalin, who one can argue achieved much politically, yet brought havoc on the lives of many of their citizens and those of other nations, are remembered for the evil nations they created.

    The greatness of a nation must depend upon the general welfare of the people, and not the achievements, no matter how glorious, of particular citizens. The reflection of achievements of individual citizens on the greatness of the nation rests upon whether or not these accomplishments improved the general welfare of the citizenry.

 

 

Edited August 17, 2015 by yagneezy