“The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.”, said Benjamin Franklin or Aldo Gucci. This is something that’s cemented in my thought process when I conceive of quality in a product or service. We’re living in an age and time where monetary considerations and market situations generally impel companies and individuals to sacrifice quality to a certain extent and base the purchase decision, in some situations, solely on the aspect of price. It doesn’t happen with everyone and all companies and is definitely not a generalization, but you know, that’s the general way things are dealt with. I’m always with the idea of getting something durable and long-lasting and using it for sufficient time rather than getting something cheaper and of inferior quality and then lugging around fixing it when it breaks down or does not serve its intended purpose every other week. Even if it doesn’t break, if the lack of quality in the product or service does not make you happy for whatever reason we bought the item/service in the first place, that requires some careful thought and consideration. Of course, that doesn’t imply splurging on some product that’s priced more than its really worth of, but the intent here is to cautiously use our intuition and sound judgement to carefully evaluate what works specifically for each one of us, and to get things with a long term plan and intention. As the famous social media joke run reads, Tajmahal wouldn’t have been so stunning if Shah Jahan had asked for three quotations and decided to go with the lowest. In total quality management (TQM) principles, it’s often said that the “cost of quality” isn’t the price of creating a quality product or service. It’s the cost of NOT creating a quality product or service. The highest price does not always necessarily yield the highest quality. And another aspect of this thought is that something expensive for a particular person may not be the same for another person, but everyone can decide their priorities and invest in quality catering to their requirements. Empirically if we generically assess the products we have used for the past couple of years and recollect the service industries that we have engaged with directly, we can get sort of a pragmatic and realistic emphasis on the importance of using high-quality products for the long term. That’s definitely worth to get our thought on.
“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values