In the news today, another report of dangerous goods imported from China. Around half a million tires, sold under non-descript brand names such as Westlake, Compass, Telluride and YKS, are apparently faulty. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is supposedly going to issue a recall, although there's a battle over who should pay for a recall, and who will be left holding the bag. In the meantime, at least a hundred thousand people are driving on tires that are likely faulty, and could blow out at any time. If you're one of those people, be very careful, and get your tires checked out.
But I didn't sit down to write because of tires. I am writing because I'm tired of hearing about cheap-assed products being sold without any care about safety or quality. And I'm writing because I'm amazed at how this problem has become so widespread, yet it's hardly being talked about.
Maybe I'm becoming an old fart, but...
Crappy products aren't a new phenomenon. When I was a kid, american cars, for example, fell into a steep decline. While the cars from the mid 1960s included some classics, by the late 1970s, US manufacturers were churning out some legendary, well, crap. A car guy can get emotional talking about an early 1960's Corvette, Camaro, or even a Ford Falcon. But talk about a Ford Pinto? Chevy Vega? Gremiln? Not exactly works of art. They were hastily designed, poorly built, and had a habit of rusting out and breaking down. Particularly if you had the early 1970s vintage "Firestone 500" tires on it, which like the Chinese tires, had a habit of blowing out at inconvenient times.
The Chevy Vega of the late 1970s had a reputation for rusting on the showroom floor. My brother had one for a few years; and while it still had some vestiges of the engineering that made the 1960s cars great, it also was an unreliable bucket of bolts. The engines wore out quickly, and burned oil like nobody's business. Another fine example was the Ford Pinto. Not an example of grace or beauty, it was a small car that had poor mileage. And, it wasn't very comfortable to ride in. Due to some design issues, it had a reputation for catching fire in collisions.
The first cars I drove were late 1970s and early 1980s american cars. And, I can honestly say they sucked. In every way, they were designed without a thought for comfort, longevity, reliability, or god forbid, gas mileage. Complete crap. One car had paint peeling off in sheets -- and it wasn't even 5 years old. I inherited it from my Mom because the steering column locked up on her for a few seconds while she was driving on the freeway -- she would never drive it again. Turns out every mechanic knew that there was a manufacturer's defect in the power steering, but GM denied it. My brother and I put a new one in, and I had a "new car" to drive, peeling paint and all, at least until the transmission blew up.
The buzzword became "quality"
But in the late 1980s, the business press started buzzing with new catch phrases, like "Total Quality Management". Sure, like all "catch phrases" in business, it was 99% hooey, but there was at least some effort to start thinking about quality.
My first "real" job was working at a branch of Ford. I wasn't making cars, I was fixing typos in proposals. It was a distant cousin of the car guys, a long-deceased branch of the family tree that made satellite equipment. But all around me -- on posters, coffee mugs, on every letterhead on every inane memo -- was the corporate slogan: Quality is Job #1. And, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ford products were getting pretty damn good.
A telling example of how complete this change was happened around 2000. The tires on Ford Explorers were blowing out, particularly on long trips or in the heat. Firestone blamed Ford, and said the tires were fine. But rather than hiring a cadre of lawyers and PR agents to obfuscate and argue, they did something that seemed unimaginable a few years before: Ford shelled out around $2 billion bucks to recall the tires and put new ones on all the cars they sold. They decided that they couldn't afford to be thought of as selling sub-standard products. Surely this cost a fortune - but Ford was worried about their reputation, and what consumers thought of them.
Driving around in 2000, a mere 7 years ago, it seemed every manufacturing plant was advertising "ISO 9000" certification. They were bringing in outside auditors both to ensure that their quality was high, and to have a way to prove to their customers that they produced quality products.
Ship 'em out as fast as we can
As the Clinton years waned, and especially as Bush took over, a competing trend took off. Ship 'em off. A push to send off as many jobs -- whole industries even -- to far flung countries. Probably Wal-Mart led the way, but God knows there were plenty of followers. And, man, it was cheaper. Go figure, but it cost a lot less to contract work out to laborers in a third world country, working in factories without any environmental or safety regulations, getting paid pennies per hour for their work.
What's interesting to think about, however, is the complete abandonment of quality in this process. Companies were handing over the production of their products to factories that they would probably never see. And, our manufacturers buy raw materials from companies that they've never heard of before.
Spend a dollar to save a dime
I've been wondering how this will play out in the long run. I first started to think about it when a friend in the tech biz told me about their corporate adventures in outsourcing. He was working for a large computer firm (that has since been mergered away), and the higher ups decided to ship off their data center to India to save money. And then monsoon season hit, and the data center was underwater. My friend was tasked with figuring out how to triage the vital data center from thousands of miles away.
And now, the product recalls. Sure, it's cheaper to buy wheat gluten from a Chinese manufacturer whose name you can't pronounce. But can you trust it? Unless you're running your own mass spectrometry facility, you probably don't know if that white stuff is wheat gluten or talcum powder. If you actually want to know what you're using, you'll have to test it all -- and it suddenly is a lot less cheap.
What happens to those companies that had to recall thousands of cans of pet food? For starters, it surely costs millions of dollars to call back all that food. But the long term damage is more insidious: Every pet owner finds out that the product that they were feeding their cat or dog was unsafe. Will they ever use that brand again?
As consumers, we have gotten used to having safe and reliable foods and products. 100 years ago, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug acts -- an act that set in motion the formation of the agencies that inspect our food supply, test our drugs, and check on our safety in the workplace. Pretty much the same thing happened in Canada, too. As a consequence, the food, drugs, and products we used every day were relatively safe. When we dove headlong into the world of offshoring and outsourcing, we apparently forgot why we had done that so long ago.
Less than 10 years ago, Ford Motor Company decided it was worth $2 billion dollars to make sure the American public wouldn't associate their products with a safety problem. Now, most of our companies are getting their food products and commercial goods -- sight unseen -- from companies they know nothing about.
The CEOs of the world need to ask themselves: How many recalls does it take before we consider all of your products to be utter crap?