During a two-week study of postal operations, the Presto City post office handled about twice as many items as the Lento City post office, even though the cities are about the same size. Moreover, customer satisfaction appears to be higher in Presto City, since the study found fewer complaints regarding the Presto City post office. Therefore, the postmasters at these two offices should exchange assignments: the Presto City postmaster will solve the problems of inefficiency and customer dissatisfaction at the Lento City office while the Lento City postmaster learns firsthand the superior methods of Presto City.
The author in the above argument concludes that postal service of the Lento City is not as desired and that it could be improved by exchanging the assignments of Presto City officers with Lento City officers. In order to support his claim, he relies on comparison of the posts handled by the two cities and the customer satisfaction levels in those two cities. The primary issue with the author's claim is that its based on some questionable assumptions and unsubstantiated premises.
The evidence that Presto City handled about twice the number of posts than Lento City in about two weeks does not strengthen the argument at large. It is possible that only the two weeks (studied weeks) in question were exceptional weeks and in other weeks of the years Presto always lag behind in the number of posts when compared to Lento. Also, there is no indication about the factors that could have caused an increase in the number of posts. There are numerous reasons that the two weeks in study had exceptionally high number of posts due to a local festival or due to local municipal election in the city. A more longer time frame of study or the factors affecting the number of posts could have helped the argument.
Furthermore, argument correlates the number of complaints to the customer satisfaction levels. There are several reasons that this number itself is deflated, for one might be that Presto City citizens do not like to complain too often. Other factors affecting the customer satisfaction levels, such as the reliability of postal service, the accuracy levels of postal workers and number of appreciations the postal services gets should have been mentioned in argument.
Also, even if the issues pointed out by the argument hold true, still the exchange of assignments of the post masters might not be able resolve the situation a hand. Consider for instance various factors that affects the efficiency of the postal system, for one, the productivity of the postal workers and the productivity of postmasters and for other, the ratio of postal workers/per person. The argument would have been benefited if it had identified the real reasons for the poor service at the Lento City.
In sum as it stands, evidences in the argument are not sufficient enough to reach the conclusion, some additional evidences such as the number of postal workers in the two cities and the real reasons for an inferior service at the Lento city would have made the argument a more compelling piece.
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