#22 - Advertising tends to have a greater influence on

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi jk,

You want to think broadly about what the right answer should do, not get tied in to particular situations which may or may not occur. So while it's true that if a bacterial strain lessened all yogurt sales (but not milk sales) that would explain our paradox, it's not required to be a bacterial strain. We are just looking for anything to differentiate the situation with yogurt at this store vs. how we see yogurt sales/milk sales typically respond to advertisements. The key is that we are looking for a difference, an explanatory reason that sales are not behaving as expected.

That's what answer choice (D) does for us. It says that yogurt sales are sharply decreasing across the country. That would explain why we are seeing lower than expected sales of yogurt in this store. We don't need a specific reason sales are decreasing. The fact that they are decreasing is enough to resolve this paradox.

Hope that helps

[smtq123]

Hi,
The argument mention SINCE the campaign began sales of Milk increased more than sales of Yougurt. Whereas option D mentions something that happened RECENTLY which creates the doubt whether they can be linked to each other.
B on the other hand says that INTENSION + CAMPAIGN wins!
Kindly clarify!
Thanks

[Adam Tyson]

Our job in this question is to explain what appears to be an odd situation, smtq123. If advertising tends to have more of an impact on yogurt sales than on milk sales, why have milk sales been the ones to see an increase after the recent ad campaign began? That runs counter to expectations. We need an answer that tells us what has caused this strange result.

Answer D does that by introducing an outside cause in the form of a general national trend. Maybe yogurt is just generally becoming less popular, or maybe there has been a health scare related to yogurt. Maybe Instagram influencers have been saying bad things about yogurt lately. Whatever the reason, if yogurt sales are down overall, that could explain why the ad campaign by this chain of stores is having less of an impact on yogurt sales than on milk sales - something else, outside that campaign, is having a negative impact on those sales, countering the effect of the ad campaign.

Answer B just tells us that people who are going to the store with the intention of getting milk generally aren't also planning to get yogurt. So what? That statement is apparently true whether there is an ad campaign going or not. It does nothing to explain why the milk sales went up more than the yogurt sales went up after the campaign began. The paradox remains: the ad campaign should have boosted yogurt sales more than milk sales, but the opposite occurred. Why? We need an answer that tells us what caused that opposite result, and B doesn't explain it. It has nothing to do with an increase in sales of either product, and tells us nothing about the ad campaign or any outside causes.

[queenbee]

Hi
The stimulus didn't say that the sales of yogurts decreased, they just said that the sales did not increase as much as milk did. To me that suggested that the yogurt sales remained the same or slightly higher than before, and the milk sales increased significantly. I didn't interpret this as though the sales of milk was being compared to the sales of yogurt. I read it as individual trends. With this in mind, i selected (E), which seemed to suggest that the price of store brand of milk was cheaper than other brands of milk (with the advertising), and that is why the sales of store brand milk increased more.
Would you please help me understand why this logic is incorrect?
Thanks

[Paul Popa]

Hey Queen,

That's an excellent question, and it matches a prephrase I made when I first read the stimulus. The main problem with E is that we're not told that LargeCo's store-brand milk was any cheaper than other brands. If it was, that could very well explain the paradox in the stimulus. But the store-brand milk might be the same price, or even more expensive, than other brands. Because we don't know the cost of the milk, we can't claim that it was responsible for the increase in sales. Hope this helps!

[willwants170]

The conclusion of the argument says: Sales of its store brand milk increased more than sales of its store brand yogurt. I thought it was referring it to the amount of sales. Reaching answer C, I thought of this situation: There was a decline in yogurt nationwide, maybe 1 sale of yogurt per month, but the ads increased it to 8 sales per month. Since milk had no such decline, I thought it was selling at 10 sales per month, and the ads increased it by 6, not by 7 like yogurt because the ads have a greater influence on yogurt. So even though the total amount of milk sales is higher, the amount each increased by is higher for yogurt than milk, refuting the conclusion and deepening the paradox. What's wrong with this train of thought? Would love a speedy response because my LSAT is in 2 days.

[Jeff Wren]

Hi Will,

Unfortunately, we weren't able to get to your question in time for the September LSAT, but hopefully this answer will help other students going forward.

First, this is a Resolve the Paradox question. Like most Resolve questions, the stimulus here contains a set of facts rather than an argument. You may have thought that the second half of the last sentence of the stimulus was a conclusion because the sentence starts with the word "since." While the word "since" is often used as a premise indicator similar to the word "because," it can also simply be used to denote a period of time (i.e. from a given point until the present). In this case, the stimulus is simply stating the fact that, from the time that the supermarket chain started advertising, store-brand milk sales increased more than store-brand yogurt sales.

You mentioned Answer C in your question but also mentioned decline in nationwide yogurt sales. Did you mean Answer D? Answer D is the only answer that discusses a decline in nationwide yogurt sales, and is the correct answer for the reasons explained in the original explanation for this question.

As for your the train of thought that you described, you want to be careful using specific numbers of what "may" have happened and making a decision about the answer based on what may be a bad example. I could just as easily come up with a different example consistent with Answer D in which the numbers do help resolve the paradox.

Instead, "zoom out" and ask yourself, if Answer D were true (that there is a nationwide decrease in yogurt sales) could this help explain why the ads didn't increase the yogurt sales as much as the milk sales, which is what would typically be expected to happen? The answer is yes, this could explain these facts and this answer does the best job of helping to resolve this paradox.

One other point of clarification about the original explanation. Milk and yogurt are both traditionally considered dairy products (although there are also non-dairy versions of each product, of course), so the paradox relates to the difference between milk and yogurt sales, not dairy and yogurt sales.