medium · GMAT Verbal
A regional retail chain surveyed customers who called its help line specifically to complain about a recent price increase and found that ninety percent of these callers said they would stop shopping at the chain. Based on this finding, the chain's pricing committee concluded that raising prices would cause the company to lose the vast majority of its customer base, and voted to cancel the planned increase entirely.
The pricing committee's reasoning is most vulnerable to criticism on which of the following grounds?
- It generalizes from a self-selected sample of complaint-line callers to the entire customer base's reactions.
- It confuses the total number of complaint calls received by the retail chain's help line with the much larger total number of individual customers who were actually affected by the price increase across the region.
- It assumes that the pricing committee has no legitimate business reason to raise prices in the first place.
- It treats the help line callers' complaints as evidence that the price increase was set at too high a dollar amount.
- It overlooks the possibility that competing retail chains also raised their own prices around the same time.
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