It seems to me that for the last ten or fifteen years, everything has been all about cheap, and cheaper. Very little is about “quality,” unless it is also about “luxury.” There was once a time, well within my living memory, that an object did not have to luxurious to be of good quality. We need to get that back, somehow. We also need to get rid of the concept that “expensive” equates with “quality.” I mean, look at a Cadillac Cimarron (and some more modern examples) closely; it’s a Chevrolet (and we know how well GM is doing) with more plastic stuff glued to it.

Wal-Mart is universally famous for being cheap. To me, that is almost exactly like the girl in high school that was known only for being easy. Every time I drive by a Wal-Mart store, the thought that goes through my mind is “Wal-Mart, the slut of retail.” They pride themselves on beating down the prices of their suppliers. And how do the suppliers manufacture cheaper goods for Wal-Mart so that Wal-Mart can say they sell for less?
Well, they don’t do it by taking less profit in their products. We all know that they are too greedy for that. Instead they remove quality form the product, and often even utility. There is an alternative that they never consider. If they would manufacture a quality (I said “quality” not “luxury”) product that worked well and lasted a while, they could sell it for a little more at that little locally-owned store across town from the butt-ugly Wal-Mart store to people that didn’t want to buy the pure crap that Sam’s kids and the MBA’s are selling these days.

If the Wal-Mart supplier would do that, he would find that there were customers for his higher-quality products. The manufacturer, just like Wal-Mart, Chevrolet, and dog food manufacturers have been working under the assumption that people are too stupid to understand that buying a quality product will keep them from having to purchase one of the pieces of crap they buy at Wal-Mart every year for the next ten years. That’s great for the manufacturer, because he gets to sell a lot more products, and make a lot more money, selling the crappy products, which are easier to make.

They can only do that if we let them. Right now, we are not only letting them, we are begging them to take our money for horribly designed and built products. We are doing that (well, I’m not), by looking only at the cheapest price in the marketplace and ignoring product quality. A lot of people that are smart enough to see that trap have nonetheless been fooled by the advertising. And a few of us do look at the quality, and do spend a little bit more at that other store across town. But not enough of us are doing that.

Those of us that can see past the ends of our noses have to take it upon ourselves to educate the Wal-Mart, Adidas, Cadillac, cheap dog food idiots. Because those fool’s habit of only looking at the cheapest thing on the market without considering quality is what is sending all of the good jobs to China and India. It is why those got-to-have-it-cheap lamebrains are working two jobs, one at McDonalds and one at Taco Bell, and can only afford to shop at Wally-World.

They are also forcing companies to buy everything from outside the U.S. where the quality standards are not quite what we are used to, because they are cheaper there. The idiots who insist on cheap are the real reason that your dog died eating dog food with a poisonous ingredient poorly and unsafely made in China. The idiots who insist on cheap are the people who are really responsible for all the sick kids that played with lead-painted toys that were made cheaply and unsafely, also in China.

I mean, lets get real here. Those people that only look at the cheapest price, and that line up ten wide (and I mean wide) at the Wal-Mart store to insist on cheap crap are the people who are killing your dog and your children. They are the people who are lowering your standard of living every year because you can’t get a decent job since they moved your old job to Korea. In fact, when you get right down to it, those idiots are the people that make you have to consider buying that cheap crap because you can’t afford anything of quality any more!