Please Rate My First AWA Essay
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09 Mar 2019, 16:18
Prompt: The following appeared as part of an annual report sent to stockholders by Olympic Foods, a processor of frozen foods:
"Over time, the costs of processing go down because as organizations learn how to do things better, they become more efficient. In color film processing, for example, the cost of a 3-by-5-inch print fell from 50 cents for five-day service in 1970 to 20 cents for one-day service in 1984. The same principle applies to the processing of food. And since Olympic Foods will soon celebrate its 25th birthday, we can expect that our long experience will enable us to minimize costs and thus maximize profits."
The argument that, as an organization ages, costs are able to be cut because it is older and wiser and has been able to channel that into greater efficiency and thus greater profits, is fundamentally flawed. It is not backed up by enlightening anecdotes. It is not supported by poignant examples, and it is not aided by common sense.
As the argument stands now, we are to understand that the age of a food processing organization directly leads to a rise in profits due to the implementation of efficiencies the organization has learned along the way. Age does not imply the ability to learn from your own mistakes. An old organization could just as easily get set in its tired ways and get bogged down in tradition. Moreover, if age did automatically mean that an organization was able to learn from its mistakes, then it certainly does not mean that the organization is able to implement its learning.
We are also asked to accept that frozen food processing methods are comparable to color film processing, and that film processing prices are a good indicator of film processing efficiency. First, we can imagine that food and film require vastly different processing methods. There are health risks associated with packing food, and these are next to non existent when processing color film. People don’t get sick from mis handled film. So to imply that colored film processing is a good comparison to frozen food processing either needs to be fully explained as to why it makes a good comparison, or utterly omitted. Additionally, a drop in prices of film do not necessarily indicate some new processing efficiency was found as these companies aged. More likely it was due to cheaper materials used to process the film, or people were no longer interested in such a product, and so to make it more appealing to the market, they had to drop their prices.
Neither of these pieces of the argument are sound, nor do they contribute to the persuasiveness of the argument. Had they been expounded upon further, or omitted all together, the argument would have been more convincing. Because the argument fails to discuss several key issues, and fails to provide sufficient evidence for its claim, it is neither sound nor persuasive. If it included items discussed above, instead of relying of the fact that age automatically implies a company has learned something, and therefore is able to apply it to achieve greater profits,then the argument would have been more thorough and convincing.