Critical Reasoning

Manufacturers of staplers make the majority of their profit on staples rather than on the staplers themselves. The Office Supply Company, which cannot sell its staples as cheaply as other manufacturers can, plans to alter the design of its stapler so that it will only accept a newly designed Office Supply Company staple, which will be sold at the same price as the Office Supply Company's current staple.

Which of the following, if true, most strongly supports the Office Supply Company's projection that its plan will lead to an increase in its sales of staples?


(A) First-time buyers of staplers tend to buy the least expensive staplers available.

(B) Annual sales of staplers are expected to double over the next three years.

(C) An Office Supply Company cost analyst is studying ways to reduce the cost of manufacturing staples.

(D) A competing manufacturer recently announced similar plans to introduce a stapler that would accept only the staple produced by that manufacturer.

(E) In extensive test marketing, stapler users found the new Office Supply Company stapler to be noticably superior to other staplers they had used.

Plan: make staplers that only take the company's staples so that customers are locked in (also known as the disposable razor strategy )

A--This is irrelevant since we don't know the relative costs of staplers from various companies

B--This is irrelevant; we can't assume that any increase in total sales of staplers will necessarily increase this particular company's sales

C--irrelevant to the plan

D--irrelevant without more information

E--this works if stapler users tend to buy staplers based on quality; they would be more likely to buy the company's stapler and thus be locked into the company's staples

Not a big fan of E, but it's the only one that works.

OA is E

Got it correct.

increase in the sales of newly designed stapler is the requirement to increase the sales of the staples..

so the option E suggests how the salesof stapler can be improved