Tired of Low Quality?

Are you not tired of paying top dollar for an item and seeing it fall apart after a few years? I certainly am. My philosophy as a (reluctant) consumer has always been to spend a little more and purchase a high-quality item, rather than pinch my pennies and purchase whatever will do the job, and purchase it again and again, each time it breaks, ad infinitum. As time has passed, however, I have found myself increasingly disappointed with my purchases, for even top-of-the-line manufactured products have come to be built with increasingly flimsy materials. Close examination of even a supposedly industrial-strength kitchen appliance, for example, such as a Dualit toaster or a KitchenAid mixer, reveals, invariably, one key weak link: a key component made out of plastic, which, defying all the steel around it, has been designed to consign the entire device to the junk yard by breaking after a few hundred hours. As time has passed, therefore, I have come to find the shops are, in fact, replete with junk, and have turned, accordingly, to the antiques market in search for quality.

Before the 1950s, many consumer objects that we take for granted today were relatively more costly; but, at the same time, they were also manufactured to be durable. As a result, if a person purchased a typewriter at the age of 20, it was likely to last until his death, and beyond. It was also a repairable item. After the 1950s, however, the philosophy of major manufacturers changed, as it was realized that once everyone had everything they needed, sales would drop, thus making it impossible to maintain growth in many industries. The result was a shift away from quality and durability and towards inbuilt obsolescence and constant technological upgrades. This not only increased market share, as consumer goods could be manufactured (and therefore sold) more cheaply, but it proved up to eight times more profitable, because of the inbuilt need to constantly replace items every few years.

Thus, the consumer has ended up paying more in the long run for a worse product – worse despite the superior technology, because, after certain point and beyond a narrow set of key areas, most people hardly benefit from added functions. Toilet paper only needs to be soft; the quilting, the colors, the moisturizers, the instant chemical analysis and forwarding of nutritional recommendations to your email address by the electronic paper, are simply excuses to charge more.

What annoys me, however, is not so much the fact that such practices exist, for, in a free market economy, they are bound to appear and add to choice; what annoys me is the fact that the old-fashioned alternative has been made impossible by the predations of big government and its preferred debt-based monetary system.

The link is less tenuous that you would like to think.

Governments grow big in the hands of world-improver politicians who think they know better, and believe that society needs a big, fat, racially indeterminate nanny, offering top-down solutions to every problem (except, of course, those afflicting the hard-working White majority that feeds her) and keeping the multicultural pressure cooker from exploding. The big, fat, racially indeterminate nanny requires vast sums of tax money, and seeks to perpetuate her presence by gorging herself into immobility. She therefore craves for an ever-larger bite of private earnings, and desires to know, monitor, record, analyze, and regulate every aspect of a citizen’s life in order to tax it. Yet, of course, even the most rapacious tax regime would be insufficient to fund the nanny’s voracity (at least not without risking open revolt from the White middle class), so her handler-politicians, for whom avoiding the noose relies on a continuously growing economy, welcome a debt-based monetary system. Such a system enables them to bribe a lazy electorate with handouts without their having to worry about the funding, for the system makes it possible for governments to borrow without limit, safe in the knowledge that debts need not ever be repaid.

Since in this system, debt equals money printing, and money printing equals currency devaluation (a.k.a., ‘inflation’), the consequence for businesses is the progressive destruction of profits through accelerating tax predation, interest on debt, and monetary devaluation. This is compounded, in turn, by the fact that taxes, interest, and devaluations also progressively destroy the purchasing power of the consumer, upon whom businesses depend. In sum: everything becomes more expensive than it needs to be.

This makes a regular supply of technological breakthroughs necessary for survival. But, as these are by no means predictable or guaranteed, and it is difficult indeed to come up with a fabulously profitable business model, the next line of defense is, necessarily, economizing on materials, labor, and service; and drastically limiting a product’s lifespan. After a while, the only businesses able to offer genuine, old-fashioned levels of quality are small in size, narrow in scope, and vocational in nature. They are also difficult to find, as they are obscure and do not survive for long.

With such environmental pressures, it is not surprising to find that profitable businesses increasingly expend their ingenuity in constantly finding new and creative ways of deceiving the consumer. Cereal brands continue to sell their cereals in large boxes, whose graphics are enhanced every year, but whose contents are reduced in the same proportion: cereal boxes are sold half empty these days; it is all about visibility on the supermarket shelf. Kitchen towels are sold in 3 for 2 offers, but, upon closer examination, the three rolls are fluffed up, with the paper towels rolled so loosely that the three rolls contain less paper than two rolls selling at full price, so one effectively pays more for less. Meat is pumped with water, ostensibly “for added succulence,” but in reality to make the cut heavier and its price higher. More egregiously, as a BBC documentary showed in the United Kingdom a few years ago, meat that is past is display-by date, and sometimes even its use-by date, is routinely soaked in brine and repackaged with new use-by dates in the future. Much of the meat being sold in major British supermarkets is rotten and fit only for vultures (come and sue me: I have years’ worth of evidence).

Creativity is diverted from truly improving a product to finding ways to charge more for a worse version of it, concealing a downgrade that costs less under the illusion of an upgrade that sells for more.

The desperate drive for ever-keener efficiency savings degrade customer service in a similar manner. Nowadays it is virtually impossible to telephone a business above a certain size and speak to a human, let alone one of European descent: consumers are forced to endure obnoxious IVRs, installed on premium lines and fiendishly designed to phlebotomize the caller’s bank account with their tiered menus, perversely ordered options, and slow and overly prolix enunciation. And, where a way is found to circumvent the IVRs (pressing star or hash repeatedly tends to work), most of the time we are served by lobotomized, low-cost humans in a cubicle in an Indian call center, with incomprehensible accents reading from, and unable to comprehend anything outside, an infuriating, patronizing, pleonastic script.

The businesses that employ these subterfuges are the fortunate ones. Usually, they are the big ones, the ones able to open sweatshops in Vietnam and El Salvador and lobby election-conscious, donor-receptive politicians for a multi-billion dollar bailout when deserted by their customers. Those who cannot marshal these resources – the traditional family businesses – find themselves progressively crunched into oblivion.

When fiscal predations are aggressively inflicted on all areas of business, when success is systematically penalized and mediocrity regularly rewarded, when private citizen and small and medium enterprise alike feel the mounting fiscal pressure without the government offering anything in return (except more surveillance, more laws, more regulations, more red tape, more immigration, more propaganda, more spurious wars, more rigged elections, and more political correctness), it is not surprising that many feel tempted to go on strike and emigrate or disappear – to say, “You know what? To hell with it!”

While living in The Netherlands during the 1980s, I found that Dutch office workers groaned under a tyrannical fiscal regime. Some dreaded being promoted and awarded a pay-raise, since that would have put them on a higher and more punitively taxed income bracket, resulting in their being left with even less of the money that they had worked for. They were, as a result, not very motivated to be particularly brilliant. The moment the clock hit 5 o’clock, pens fell from fingers and offices experienced explosive decompression, with workers disappearing into the ether within seconds. At he same time, the high streets of all major towns were teeming any day of the week – teeming with young, able-bodied, healthy men and women (many of them colored), who preferred not working and receiving generous welfare payments over working and having their financial reward stolen from them.

During the 1990s, such a species was not uncommon in Nordic countries – their generous welfare provisions made it possible to live a perfectly comfortable, idle lifestyle.

Among Third World immigrants, this is El Dorado: an abundance of free money, security, reliable infrastructure, space-age technology, and a non-threatening population of soft, depressed, dependent, indolent Whites, sitting ducks for them to shoot down (or blow up) at their earliest convenience.

Against such backdrop, it no doubt becomes possible for some of the European aborigines to conceptualize periodic spells on welfare as an effort to claw back money that has been suctioned from their paycheck by the government. Certainly, this would avoid the risk of imprisonment through becoming a tax rebel.

The picture that emerges is a world of impoverished, demotivated workers, enslaved by debt and forced to endure poor customer service and to make do with flimsy, cheap (but overpriced), low-quality goods, manufactured by debt-ridden companies forced into subterfuge and pandering to privileged minorities in their desperation to stay above the rising waters of inflation and taxation; a world of pyramid schemes, Ponzi schemes, and Nigerian businessmen proposing to share their millions, because criminality is the only way left to run a profitable enterprise.

Fortunately, there is still a way around this in some areas. Mine is bypassing the shops and going to the antiques and second-hand market. Not only are antiques not subject to VAT or manufactured by raceless politically correct corporations, but one is more likely to find goods made to last a lifetime. Some of these goods, because they are both sturdy and low-tech, offer the additional advantage of immunizing the consumer against eventualities and small disasters. For example, two years ago my laptop broke down during a house move. I was, at the time, in the middle of writing a novel. What did I do? I lifted the cover of my 1955 Remington Noiseless and carried on typing. Another example: two months ago my wife and I experienced a power outage. Modern telephones need mains power to operate and we live in the country, meaning our cellphones have only a weak and intermittent signal. No chance of it holding out long enough to get past the IVR and the endless queue. What did I do? I went to my 1947 Bakelite rotor-dial telephone and called the electricity company, keeping silent until I was allowed past the IVR. Obsolete technology works just fine in many instances and provide a more economical and reliable solution to modern technological failure (an event likely to become more frequent in our dystopian future of crippling debt, shortages, 90% taxes, and hyperinflation). It also makes it more difficult for the government to keep track of the consumer, as newer technology is more capable and efficient in this respect.

Perhaps there is a suggestion here as to a possible way forward. I am sure I am not the only one who thinks this way.

I would like to think that the future is in traditional, high quality, original goods and services, supplied by small and medium enterprise capable of social intelligence and a personal touch. In other words, in going back to the good old ways, except with the benefit of modern science and superior technical knowledge. These were the ways that made Europe the world’s economic master. Of course, whether or not that remains a fanciful dream depends on what we do. But there is no doubt that the hard-working White middle class is tired of being ripped off with cheap, generic, sub-prime manufacture, IVRs, and microcephalous, fake-sounding, foreign call center nincompoops, employed by faceless, raceless, politically correct corporations propped up by bailout money and partly owned by a bloated, incompetent, traitorous, and virtually unaccountable government.

I certainly do not want to give the enemy my money, if I can help it.