GMAT Essays (AWA)

Please be brutally honest! I want to get a good idea of where I'm starting out with my AWA skills. Thanks in advance.

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.”

Response:
The argument that Olympic Foods will see a period of minimized costs and maximized profits due to occurrences in other organizations, exhibits an inappropriate comparison that must be addressed to substantiate the argument. Organic foods attempts to connect itself to a disparate industry by illustrating a similarity in their years of doing business. This alone does not constitute a logical argument that leads to a conclusion that Olympic Foods will see a period of minimized costs and maximized profits.

The arguments fails to see any of the potential differences between Olympic Foods and other organizations or industries, such as color film processing. Although the argument stated that the color film processing industry saw a price drop in a particular product over the course of 25 years, there were no specific details that tied the product or the industry behaviors to Organic Foods other than the duration of doing business - which is a metric that cannot be solely relied upon when projecting future business behavior. Additionally, there were no details that explained how a price reduction could lead to a period of cost minimization and profit maximization.

Since the argument creates an inappropriate comparison between two contrasting industries, it is not sound or persuasive. If it included more details on how Organic Foods displayed additional characteristics that were similar to color film processing, the argument would have been more thorough and convincing.