Premises: In the five years since the opening of Colson’s, a nondiscount department store, a new store has opened at the location of every store in the shopping district that closed because it could not compete with Colson’s.
Conclusion: those locations will not stay vacant for long.
Department store are larger than the (small) stores, such as Wal-Mart
The premises argue the advantage that the new store is opened despite the failure of preexisting stores in competition with the department store. In this case it must follow the example that, although all the existing stores will be closed in five years, new stores will still be open thereafter. So, both scenarios will be the same.
However, the argument can be weaken by present a condition that is not the same for both case, that is, one scenario is more favorable to the other. How that might be?
The condition for premises illustrate the competition from the large department store with small stores, answer B says those new stores are discount store, therefore, although they are disadvantage in size, they have advantage in price, because the large department store is non-discount store.
However,, in the scenario the author argues, if there were new stores to be open thereafter, they would face the competition from the large department “discount store”, from which they would gain no advantage.
In conclusion, the competing scenarios and the incentives for the new store opening are different, therefore, the argument is weakened.
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