Please rate the argument.

[vijay_dj]

The following appeared as part of a recommendation from the business manager of a department store.
“Local clothing stores reported that their profits decreased, on average, for the three-month period between August 1 and October 31. Stores that sell products for the home reported that, on average, their profits increased during this same period. Clearly, consumers are choosing to buy products for their homes instead of clothing. To take advantage of this trend, we should reduce the size of our clothing departments and enlarge our home furnishings and household products departments.”
Discuss how well reasoned... etc.

The argument concludes saying that the departmental stores should switch to selling of household artifacts instead of the regular clothing sales to take advantage of the so called trend which is prevalent in the locality. The aforementioned argument though appears valid and convincing at the first glance, an in depth analysis ascertains that, the argument has failed to consider a lot of other aspects governing the conclusion mentioned above. Some of the questions that might arise on analysis of the argument are listed below.
There may be a variety of reason that the stores selling household products to make a profit on, the stores might have involved in a variety of advertisements and marketing strategies in place to gain a substantial profit in their stores, a blind consideration saying the demand for the household products have risen and entering an unknown market is not a suitable conclusion to arrive upon.
Similarly, the failure of the local clothing sales might also have been due to a large number of factors including a rise in the cotton and wool for making fabrics, or an increase in the prices of the fabrics by itself to compensate for earlier incurred losses, or in fact it could have been as a result of poor marketing strategies and lack of attractiveness might have been a reason for the slump in the clothing sales. If the decrease in profits are due to an inherent nature as those mentioned above, such a case might also appear incase of the household products. If it does occur, would switching again to a different set of products be the valid option? Instead of rather switching and entering an unfamiliar industry product, it would be a better and sensible option to re-energize the familiar market with suitable strategies and hence boost the sales.
In addition to the above mentioned reasons which outweigh the issues the argument fails to address, the sample space considered in the argument, a span of three months, would that be a logical conclusion for a store to determine that its products has reached its saturation? It could have been as a result of a variety of factors including, seasonal uptrend, infestation of termites, or any other reason prevalent over just a short period of time. Thus a sample space is too small cannot let one to arrive at such a conclusion.
Considering the argument, which is based on the reasoning of switching to a performing product, would have been acceptable and more convincing if it would have supplied answers to the questions mentioned in the above paragraphs. And since it fails to consider a lot o logical reasoning mentioned in the passages above, its safe to conclude that, such an argument is based on a limited knowledge and needs much more information to arrive at a conclusion stated in the passage.