Idiotic Marketing Book Figures

I'm reviewing for my marketing exam tomorrow morning at 8:00 and once again came across this particularly useless and aesthetically displeasing figure in the book. (I apologize for the bad photo; my scanner isn't set up so I had to take a snapshot and had trouble keeping my hands steady enough for the print to be readable.) I have complained before about how I spent the first 75% or so of the course basically ignoring most of the drawings, graphs, and figures in the margins of the book, and this figure is a good illustration of why.

The text right above this figure reads: "As suggested by Figure 16-4, a supply chain manager's key task is to balance these four customer service factors [just given in previous sentence] against total logistics cost factors [described a couple paragraphs above]." It is hard to see what this figure adds to anyone's understanding of this process; it is just a rather mind-bogglingly literal representation of the text with extremely poor execution. It does not even qualify as "cartoon-like" despite the fantasy physics that underlies the universe of this figure, and it is almost unbelievably ugly. It's like somebody has taken a pyramid drawing featured in a children's comic book version of the Time Life Books "Mysteries of the Unknown" series and slapped it into a bad 3-D graph produced in 10 year out-of-date software using the default settings.

It's amusing that the two sides do not, actually, appear to be in balance in this drawing anyway. And they have rendered the various factors so that they give the mistaken impression of being completely independent, while the book has already told us that "many of these costs are interrelated so that changes in one will impact the others."

Overall, this figure is so bad, it's kind of impressive.