Oxford Cereals Essay

979 Words4 Pages
Background The advocacy group Consumers Concerned About Cereal Cheaters (CCAC) is dedicated to exposing fraudulant packaging in the cereal industry. Their major claim is Oxford Cereals is manufacturing boxes of cereal at less than advertised weights of 368 grams. The main cereals their investigation centered on were Oxford O’s and Oxford’s Alpine Frosted Flakes with Vitamins & Minerals. In each case, they began their research by purchasing five boxes of each cereal brand. The weights were documented, Figure 1, and they concluded 80 percent of the boxes were underweight. They are demanding Oxford Cereals make a public apology and issue refunds to all consumers. FIGURE 1 SAMPLE OXFORD O's (grams) ALPINE FROSTED FLAKES (grams) 1 360.4 366.1 2 361.8 367.2 3 362.3 365.6 4 364.2 367.8 5 371.4 373.5 t of the box weighed less than 368 rams! Oxford Cereals should be embarrassed! Analysis In order to validate the conclusions made by the Consumers Concerned About Cereal Cheaters (CCAC), it is necessary to review the sampling methodology used by the group. More importantly, it needs to be determined if their statistical sampling procedure holds merit. If there is no validity to their analysis, their demands of public apologies and refunds are not warranted. The CCAC’s sampling procedure defined all Oxford Cereals as the population to analyze but limited the frame to only two brands of cereal; reason being these were the favorites of the members. By drawing samples from this frame, it created a nonprobability sample and thus the theories developed for probability sampling are not applicable for further analysis. In this case, the nonprobability sampling they used was convenience sampling since the boxes of cereal were selected by going to the favorite stores of the members. This selection bias and the inability to generalize the results contributes to a
Open Document