The Decay in Quality

Here's an interesting take on the economy and manufacturing.

Stainless Steal | ZeroHedge

Pretty much. Applies in other areas as well.

Quality, in the end, crucially depends on customers not accepting service and items that do not meet their requirements and on changing suppliers of persistently poor quality services and poor quality items.

Suppliers must know that customers will make them pay for poor quality.

John Broomfield said:

Quality, in the end, crucially depends on customers not accepting service and items that do not meet their requirements and on changing suppliers of persistently poor quality services and poor quality items.

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Provided of course that the supplier really cares based on the total mass quantity of purchasers over time.......Study McDonald's trend from preaching & delivering QSC to now. Other industries you'll see the same trending over the last 20-40 years.

Randy said:

Provided of course that the supplier really cares based on the total mass quantity of purchasers over time.......Study McDonald's trend from preaching & delivering QSC to now. Other industries you'll see the same trending over the last 20-40 years.

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Having to repeatedly pay the price of nonconformity will eventually put the supplier out of business. But, in some markets, we could end up with customer selection replacing supplier selection.

I have no idea what the author's point was, unless it was that products today aren't as good as they used to be. Duh. The example of stainless steel from China corroding indicates that the author is unaware of the existence of different grades of stainless steel, and that some grades will indeed rust over time. It's always been that way.

John Broomfield said:

Having to repeatedly pay the price of nonconformity will eventually put the supplier out of business.

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This is a tautology, because it ignores the issue of scale. If there is enough nonconformity the business will eventually fail as a result, but there might be continual nonconformity without business failure if there are enough profitable conforming products.

Jim Wynne said:

I have no idea what the author's point was, unless it was that products today aren't as good as they used to be. Duh. The example of stainless steel from China corroding indicates that the author is unaware of the existence of different grades of stainless steel, and that some grades will indeed rust over time. It's always been that way.

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This was my takeaway from the article/conversation. Few consumers set out to "get less than what they pay for", and for any given consumer product it is (I presume) an even smaller fraction of consumers who would be capable of formally describing what it is they are specifically getting for the price they are willing to pay. "Stainless steel cutlery" is a market that is reasonably well-known for having a wide spectrum of raw materials, and also marketing (hype, promises, fraud).

I think that the article was a bit disingenuous (or at least simplistic) about the link between physical materials and "planned obsolescence" especially with stainless steel products, for the exact reason mentioned by @Jim Wynne . Knives and metallurgy are a pretty old technologies, as is cost-cutting and over-promising.

I had to look up tautology. Thanks Jim.

Johnnymo62 said:

I had to look up tautology. Thanks Jim.

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Write it down because he uses it a lot.