IS CHEAP ACTUALLY CHEAP?

The Paradox

Real life paradoxes could be interesting and debilitating at the same time.

Calling someone cheap is derogatory but companies, products and services notwithstanding, leave no stone unturned to, boost sales, increase turnover and book profits going cheap. Governments by statute, do everything to make sure they take the least cost. Substantiated claims are commensurately rewarded. These rewards are so addictive and intoxicating that people become blind to costs of going cheap while managements choose to remain oblivious to long-term damages, short-term advantages bring home. It fuels institutionalised proliferation of short-lived products ignoring long term costs of maintenance, down time and replacements. While burgeoning short-lived inventory demand lesser ‘immediate’ fiscal outgo for consumers and set cash counters ringing for sellers, such short-sighted profiteering steadily inflicts long-term pecuniary penalties on us individuals and irrevocable environmental damages on the human kind. The society, smug in the misplaced belief of technological advances feigns sleep, oblivious to this paradoxical coexistence of profits and profit-triggered losses. 

Rugged Longevity or Fragile Technology

There were times, when one brought a product and it went on and on and on. When it went kaput, it would promptly be repaired and reused, re-re-repaired and re-reused. There were also people who could precisely detect causes for failures and knew exactly how to put it right back into service. Many such products saw and served few generations. Brand loyalty transcended generations. Those were yesteryear stories of  stuff repaired and reused.

Nowadays, most products pack up either before expiry of warranty or definitely shortly thereafter. To add insult to injury, the technical support wizard who attends to the complaint for a consideration called ‘service charge’ is often clueless. After inspection of the equipment, often a charade, promptly declares it ‘Beyond Economical Repairs’. Some of them even attempt to convince the customer how lucky it is to have the machine go kaput since it is the right time to grab a technologically superior replacement at an unbelievably benevolent price with an enticing buy-back scheme.

Comparisons between a rugged archaic refrigerator that refuses to give up despite an abusive existence and an elitist state-of-the-art double door intelligent convertible fridge that refuses to serve a day after warranty expires, sums up the prevailing situation. Deference to technological advances and miniaturization notwithstanding, longevity of many a new age product stands suspect. Whether the fragility is by design or not is a question that must trouble society, intensely now.

Bitter Yet Better?

Some products, especially white goods, marketed and sold as state-of-the-art are particularly notorious for failures immediately after expiry of warranty. Discussions, confidentiality assured, with managers up the chain give an impression that companies could be eyeing higher volumes through replacement sales. ‘More Bitter - The Better’ seems to be the underlying marketing philosophy. A consumer can be motivated, on some pretext or the other, to part with his money on a technologically better piece of the same brand as replacement for the defective piece. Zero interest financing and attractive buy-back clauses function well as enticing baits. Fortunately for the market, for every discerning customer opting out of the brand there are hundreds with more disposable incomes being added every day to the market, readily led up the garden path by glib talking sales executives.

Credibility a Non-issue?

While cost of servicing pre-warranty expiry failures might have been catered for by the company, there is little chance for incessant pecuniary bleeds inflicted upon consumers by post warranty failures to receive any consideration. On the contrary, unmindful of the compounding cost of credibility-loss, for some post-warranty service is bait, hook and revenue. Unfaithful and ill prepared staff at the contact edge aggravate loss of credibility through greed and lack of professionalism. After one or more incidents of living with an untrustworthy brand, clients tend to shun the entire range of products of the brand. Ignorant of the fact that longevity sustained by quality and affordability ensure brand immortality, smooth talking salesmen garner and fuel sales peddling ailing products amongst the gullible new. There is no dearth of poor products, gullible customers and glib talkers. It may serve brands well if they remind themselves of the potential informal adverse referrals, right or wrong, have in obliterating the brand itself from the market.

Unseen Costs

Unseen, unspoken about, yet not considered alarming but the most afflicting by-product of poor quality and cheap production is the burden environment has to bear for the huge inventory produced, warehoused, discarded, dumped and non-recycled. To make production profitable, volumes are required. To improve profits yet more volumes at even cheaper input costs are required. To move huge volumes of new inventory, more demand should be generated. High rate of failures repairs and replacement is required to fuel higher demand. Then greed kicks in. This destructive combination necessitates brutal invasions into nature’s belly across the globe. Environmental degradation thrive on such mindless, greed fuelled activities.

Junkyards have mushroomed over cities and towns all over the world. Often created at the periphery of settlements, they invade inwards, thrive within and overwhelm. Maximum discards are necessitated not due to products outliving life promised but because they are abandoned as ‘beyond-economical-repairs’. Concept of repairs have made way for replacement. With poor uptake for recycling, a large pool of material resources is wasted and left to pollute nature. The burden and impact of pollutants leaching out of these colossal dump yards have neither been fully documented nor recognised. While the world is busy buying and discarding, we tend to forget that the pace of discard is also pace of environmental pollution.

Not only individuals but even the society has to collectively bear the cost of poor-quality. It is in the interest of the society and its longevity that products manufactured, marketed and sold have life long enough to reduce burden of waste. Else we may  be racing to choke ourselves in plentiful refuse?