When the best quality is not enough

Posted on 18/10/2013 by Karen
 

The other day, I was whinging to a friend about the fact that things just aren’t made the way they used to be. (At the risk of sounding like I’m 100 years old, this seems to be a very common whinge with me lately… anyway…) This particular whinge was about pegs. Wooden pegs. Yes, those things that are supposed to hold your laundry in place on the clothes line so they don’t get blown off into the dirt so that you are forced to wash them again.

The wooden pegs I had just recently bought were rubbish. They just fell apart after only a few uses. Unlike the pegs my mum used to use. Now the reason I know mum’s pegs were better is because I still have some of them. My mum died 7 years ago and when we split everything up, I got the pegs — amongst other things, of course. So I know that those pegs have been in use for at least 7 years. And some of them are still going fine. Unlike the new ones that seem to last less than 7 days.

My friend Maxine, who was the lucky recipient of my whinge responded immediately with “That’s because they all come from China now. There used to be a company in Melbourne that made really good quality pegs but they went out of business.” Sadly, that seems to be the way for a number of businesses. Brilliant products but people just don’t seem to want to pay for quality. Saving a couple of bucks on pegs doesn’t seem to make much sense if it makes your life more difficult.

Now you might think I’m putting too much emphasis on something seemingly unimportant, but research shows that human beings can cope amazingly well with big stresses, but it’s those little tiny things that can get us unhinged.