Practice — Hot · Solution

One good path. Different visuals reaching the same figures are equally correct.

Claim 1 — "December is our biggest month"

Verdict: wrong, narrowly — and the follow-up is the interesting part.

A line chart of Revenue by month shows the year peaking in May at $2,089,552.37, with December second at $2,066,122.07 — a $23,430 gap. The claim fails, but the VP's mental model ("retail peaks at the holidays") is what really needs correcting, and the slicer does it: select Outdoor in a category slicer and the line reshapes completely — Outdoor's own peak is June, at $771,398.26, with a summer plateau from May through August and a floor in the winter. Fire pits and patio sets buy Lantern & Pine a second high season that offsets the catalog's December lean. Staffing and stock plans built on "December is the peak" would understaff the early summer.

Claim 2 — "Furniture is biggest, give it the floor space"

Verdict: true in dollars, false in units — and floor space arguably follows units.

Two bar charts — Revenue by Category and Quantity by Category — crown different winners. Furniture earns the most per item; Lighting moves the most items while ranking fourth in dollars. Neither chart is "the" answer: dollars argue for Furniture's prominence, units argue that customers walk out with a lamp far more often than a sofa. There is no correct answer here and that is the lesson — the analyst's job is to put both rankings in front of the decision, not to pick one silently.

A recommendation that would survive the meeting

"December is close but not our peak — May was, at $2.09M to December's $2.07M, because Outdoor gives us a second high season that runs May through August and peaks in June. I would plan staffing and inventory around two seasons, not one. On floor space: Furniture is our revenue leader at $7.6M, but it ranks fourth in units sold — Lighting actually moves the most items, 18,695 last year. Before reallocating floor space I would want both rankings on the table, plus margin by category, which this dataset does not contain."

Reflection answers

• Claim 2 would have survived a revenue-only analysis — every revenue chart confirms it. Only the quantity lens exposed the tension. Claim 1 falls to any honest monthly revenue chart.
• Missing before a real floor-space call, any two of: profit margin by category (revenue is not profit), physical size per unit (a sofa and a candle are not equal shelf claims), store-level mix (the Southwest's mix may not be the Midwest's), or returns by category (this file's revenue is gross of returns).