Argument:
“In general, people are not as concerned as they were a decade ago about regulating their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. Walk into the Heart’s Delight, a store that started selling organic fruits and vegetables and whole-grain flours in the 1960’s, and you will also find a wide selection of cheeses made with high butterfat content. Next door, the owners of the Good Earth Café, an old vegetarian restaurant, are still making a modest living, but the owners ofthe new House of Beef across the street are millionaires.”
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My analysis:
The argument states that people are not concerned about their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses as their were a decade ago. This argument contains quite some flaws in terms of the concreteness of the said statement as well as the supporting statements author used to prove his claim. Much has been assumed, which is actually baseless and doesn't leads to the reader reaching any hard conclusion.
The first and major flaw of this argument is that there are not statistical figures provided for anyone to verify the claim made by the author, the use of the phrase 'in general' itself shows the lack of base and strength. There should have been information regarding any surveys conducted, such as a graph comparing people's diet at present and decades ago to make this argument carry any weight. The second flaw is that when author states that Heart's Delight has started keeping varieties of cheeses and butterfat content, it doesn't proves in any way that existing customers of Heart's Delight, who used to buy fruits and vegetables from the store, have now switched to cheese and red meat. This can lead to any conclusion, one of them being that Heart Delight wanted to attract customers who were already meat and cheese consumers from decades, to increase their customer base and hence increase revenue, which makes the author's claim void. Sales figures and proportions should have been provided to analyse if people have really switched their diets. Finally, the author compares the owners of two restaurants, using the criteria of how much money they have, without providing any background. The author claims that the owners of House of Beef are millionaires without clearly stating that whether they gained this sum of money through their restaurant or by other sources of income. Also, there is no details on the prices of dishes and correspondingly the per customer profitability of each restaurant, as Good Earth Cafe may have much more customers than House of Beef, but due to their dishes being very cheap and nominally priced they don't earn as much profit as the latter.
All these flaws make it very hard for this argument to prove what it aimed to. Instead of a factual and informative article this seems more like a personal opinion which is not backed by any evidence or factual data.
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Thank you