GMAT Essays (AWA)

The following appeared in a magazine article on trends and lifestyles.

"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 of the new House of Beef across the street are millionaires."

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.


For the most part, the argument that the product lines sold by the stores mentioned, as well as differences in levels of economic success enjoyed by these stores, offers little valuable information about whether people are more or less concerned today about regulating their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses relative to forty years ago.

The argument cites the product lines of three stores as evidence of consumers' level of concern about their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. However, this evidence is specious because the argument says nothing about the market where these stores are located. Possibly, the stores are functioning in an isolated market where consumers have unique preferences that are atypical of the national marketplace. If so, the evidence represents consumer behavior taking place in a microcosm, and what holds true of the microcosm, obviously, is not necessarily true of the national market place as a whole. For example, in the city of town where the Heart's Delight, Good Earth Cafe, and House of Beef are located, people may always have been unique as consumers in that they have unusually strong preferences for meet and fatty cheeses. What is true of the consumers in this city or town is not necessarily true of the national marketplace as a whole.

Another weakness in the argument is that it assumes that any evidence of people's current preference for red meat and fatty cheeses is proof that consumers desire these foods more today than they did forty years ago. The argument proffers no data indicating how much red meat and fatty cheese was sold by stores forty years ago. Hence, that the Heart's Delight store presently has meat and cheese product lines, and that today the House of Beef enjoys robust sales, may be typical of how these stores were functioning economically for the past forty years. If so, the evidence cited does not support the argument that consumer's preferences have changed concerning red meat and fatty cheeses.

Additional weaknesses in the argument are its failure to identify the consumer niche that is the customer base of Heart's Delight and House of Beef. Possibly these consumers are boutique customers -- individuals who have tastes that are atypical of the population as a whole -- and that the stores mentioned exist chiefly to cater to these people's unusual tastes. If so, the evidence cites in the argument is meaningless.

A final weakness in the argument is that it does not address possible discrepancies in the competency levels of the managers of the stores. That the Good Earth Cafe experiences marginal economic success relative to vendors that market red meat and fatty cheeses may say more about relative management and marketing capacity than it does about consumer preferences.

In summary, the argument should be regarded as superficial unless it is augmented with additional data that defines the market where the stores are located, whether this market is typical or atypical of the national economy as a whole, how efficiently the stores are operated, and how consumers preferences today objectively compare to their preferences forty years ago.