Posted On: Thursday - December 29th 2016 11:58AM MST
In Topics: Cheap China-made Crap Curmudgeonry
Went 2/4:1 on toys this Christmas. That's 2 out of 4 broken by end of day 1 - that'd be Christmas day. One of them starting slipping gears after about 1 hour of use, and the kid treated it with kid gloves too. He or I may have mis-handled the second one, but the part that broke was super-thin plastic and un-fixable, even with good super-glue, not the crap in my closet.
Same as usual, the people at the store don't have time to know or care about what broke. I understand that, but I always let them know the story. I quit feeling bad about returning anything that may be broken due to slight misuse (up to the point of being backed up over by the car). I told the one girl, to the effect of: Hey, I'll keep coming back with these until we've got use out of 'em. I wonder whether the US headquarters will do the math and compare selling 3 or 4 of these for the cheap price versus 1 good one at double the price?* I know, I know, math is hard, especially for these CEO's.
When it comes down to it, not all of this is the fault of the Chinese. They make much of the crap to the specs. of the engineers (if there are any) or designer types at the company HQ over here. However, there is much cheating going on over on the other side, so parts specified do not always match the parts on the products*.
Ford Motors' slogan at one point was: "Quality is job one." They may or may not have meant it, but in China, I imagine the translations of their company mottos would be closer to "Quality is about, job four or so." Unfortunately, the number 4 is a very unlucky number over there. That's the root problem right there - the unlucky number 4!
It really should be bumped down to 5 or lower, as jobs 1, 2, and 3 aren't gonna budge:
1) Job 1 - Make a lot of money.
2) Job 2 - Save even more by serving only white rice and 6-day old turnips in the company cafeteria.
3) Job 3 - Keep employees from jumping out of the higher floor balconies at the new facilities.
* I will make one more post about this regarding an exercise machine in the near future. Spoiler alert - we got our way.
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