Pre-war stuff seems to last forever. The best manufactured products seem to be the ones that are older than our parents, with a majority of the well kept ones still pretty usable today. With a little TLC , you can restore a vintage automobile or an old refrigerator to it’s former glory.
Today, some products stand out in the quality department, but a vast majority are just mediocre, plastic and are deemed disposable. In the past, there was joy to be had in making something last longer than it was designed for, because you ended up saving money. Repairing your own stuff was common, accepted and cool.
There’s an alarming trend to change phones every two years or every time a new flagship rolls out, which is insane because the two year old phone can do whatever the new model can. It’s just a little bit slower due to older hardware, but still very much usable. What ever happened to getting the most bang for your buck?
Shoddy Quality
You can blame mass consumerism, aggressive advertising and plain old human materialism for this plague, but the blame can also be squarely placed on manufacturers for making products of questionable quality. Products that that have undergone a bare minimum of testing that translates to products not worth keeping around.
Manufacturers think they’re saving money, but that’s just not the case. Shoddy quality results in poor customer satisfaction and they run the risk of repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again. This cycle is bad for business and bad for the brand. Any kind of quality control is better than none at all.
In the software world, Microsoft is notorious for releasing their OS chock full of bugs and vulnerabilities. Since millions of people use their products, it’s OK to release it and then offer “hotfixes†and patches later on when user complaints start to pour on, effectively making their customers part of QA as beta testers.
At this rate, all Microsoft customers should be employed as testers on Pegasie.com! They can pull it off because of their sheer size, but for smaller companies, adopting the same approach is suicide. People want great products that work out of the box, and no one really has time to tinker or fiddle with setup, let along try to solve something themselves.
Quality over Quantity
Isn’t that the essence of making something anyway? To add value to other people’s lives and not add to their stress and anxiety? The obvious answer is written on the old appliances of yesteryear. Heavy, solid and indestructible. If you ever owned a cast iron Tonka truck that you could ride on as a kid, you know what quality is.
It’s always better to choose quality over quantity, regardless of price. Imagine buying a car. Would you buy a car with a proven quality record, made with quality materials and by trained personnel or would you rather settle for a car from an obscure brand, with a poor safety record and assembled by untrained personnel because it’s 50% cheaper?
By choosing a car built with quality in mind, you’ll save money because of fewer trips to the shop to have it repaired and you’ll have peace of mind knowing that it won’t fall apart on you. You can’t say the same for the car with shoddy quality. Poor material choices lead to poor design and a lower resale value.
Conclusion
You can save money by adopting an outlook of someone who lived in the past. There was a shortage in materials, so everyone took care of their stuff and didn’t live in excess. Would it be unfashionable to use an old iPhone 4S today because they just released the iPhone 6? They function pretty much the same way, don’t they?
Save your cash by not wasting it in products with crappy quality. Choose only the best, spend a little more knowing that you can use it for a long time.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Part of the problem is being able to afford the more expensive products up front. I think that the initial cash outlay required to buy the higher quality stuff is a big problem for many and definitely acts as a catch-22.