Walmart

Figuring Out The Truth

There has been talk that the crime rates in Wal-Mart parking lots are significantly higher than the crime rates in other big names stores such as Target. I believe in order for someone to delve into this issue and go about comparing two large companies, such as Wal-Mart and Target, to try and find a reason for their significantly large crime rates, you would need an equal number of stores to compare between the two corporations. I don’t believe it’s fair to take a sample of, lets say, thirty-five stores, and have it be compared to a sample of fifty stores. More likely than not, you’re going to get an inaccurate reading of the situation if you choose to report your statistics in this way. To justify my argument, I noticed the authors of the Wal-Mart crime report took a sample of thirty-two Wal-Mart stores, and thirty Target stores to come up with their statistical data on why they believe Wal-Mart stores have higher crime rates than Target stores in relatively the same location. This is not the right way to approach this. You can’t take two different sample sizes; such as they did, and expect to come up with a reasonable explanation for all this. Now, I understand there’s not a whole lot of difference between thirty-two and thirty, only two, but nonetheless, it’s still a difference, and that is one of the biggest problems I see in this report.

In my opinion, I don’t believe the author of this report committed the fallacies of unrepresented sample, but he did commit the fallacies of hasty generalization. An author has committed a hasty generalization anytime the sample he’s basing his report on his not big enough to represent the entire population. In this instance, the sample he’s basing his report on can’t represent the population, because he’s taking two different sample sizes. In the report, the author has found Wal-Mart to have a significantly larger amount of crimes reported than Target. This is to be expected though, because the...