The Lawspeaker
05-12-2010, 01:20 PM
WalMart a flourishing conduit of poor quality products (http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/19527)
Isabel P. Ball
January 22, 2007
Quality has always means to me a certain standard for products, when consumers could get a long mileage of use, and before, quality was the hallmark of consumer products in America. As has been, the stamped seal of Made In USA was a guarantee of consumers’ satisfaction. Recalling how as a young girl in the Philippines our parents would insist that we buy nothing but parts with the USA seal stamped on it.
With time, that scenario has changed with globalization. Perceptively, quality, nowadays has taken a backseat to quick profits in America, and occurring with speed of soil erosion in a flooded river. The catalyst is the brainchild of world distribution marketing the birth of gargantuan WalMart store.
I first heard of Walmart open in my small university town of Fort Collins in mid-80s. Then, the community buzzed with excitement about availability of affordable products. Curiosity, more than anything, I stepped inside the store, and to my chagrin, I saw what I had initially thought about the chain store, a quality much lower than sold at the JC Penney, May D & F, Sears, Kmart, Montgomery Wards and other reputable store names, I used to shop at.
The initial visit was repeated in the 2000s, when the store in National City opened. Our shopping spree at the Mall and other outlets, before Walmart, stopped, altogether, as the conglomerate has turned into a one-stop-shop, selling clothes, groceries, nursery, electronics, pharmacy, tools, to just about anything an individual would need.
Walmart, an alternative store, apparently, has easily captured America’s consumer heart, raking in billions in profit, thereby, edging many other stores out of the competition landscape, or had somehow forced other stores to downsize to survive. As the buying power of many Americans slips, Walmart is becoming the most frequented shopping place for the mainstream, enticing even the quality-conscious middle class.
Not much of a shopper myself, and on a restrained budget, like many Americans, I would buy essentials at the Walmart. While I endure the sacrifices of patronizing the cheaper price products, noticeably, the quality is eroding, and seemingly becoming disproportionate to the price tags that had kept up with inflation.
In my recent shopping, a pack of underwear bearing a reputable brand, attractively colored and designed, however, belied poor quality in materials and workmanship from Mexico. Sizes starkly differed, as though the materials were overstretched, and the elastic were like a rubber band that has reached its elasticity point. As I was stymied by an earlier return of a wrong-size pack of underwear, I decided to keep the hipsters for validation. Soon, I was able to prove a fact that the eyes are still the best means by which to judge the physical quality of a product. Discards the pack of hipsters had become, and so was my hard earned moolah into the trash. Similarly, the socks I bought containing many pieces in a pack, were also of low quality. A one color, fit-many-sizes pack was a disappointing buy. They fit loosely in my size 7-foot. Cumbersome and irritating, they rotate about inside the shoes; the heels and toes ending on wrong sides of the foot.
On that shopping day, I sort of splurged myself, and picked up a handy cassette player, of an unknown brand, selling truly inexpensively, and was irresistible. In addition, a boom box with cassette, CD, radio features, also of unknown brand, I bought for its looks to replace the still functioning, but bulky Sony stereo. These electronics, however, all lay in my room, unused for lack of the expected quality in sound and performance. You would say perhaps that price always has its weight on quality. To which I’d debate that poor quality products should have no place on any stores. If these products fail to satisfy the consumer, then, the sensible act is to ban them from production, avoid related waste.
Walmart is a store riddled with controversies. It has been alleged to employ cheap labor, and illegal employees in its roster. These, and the degraded quality of products imported mainly from China and Mexico, to mention a few, are the sources of the store’s strength in the business.
The community is saving, price wise, indeed. But something that America seems to be ignoring is the equation of quality to the price. What good are the cheap priced products if consumers are not satisfied with them? In the short and long term, realization might dawn that all these price wars add nothing to consumers’ prosperity, instead only creating few more billionaires in the midst of an impoverished citizenry, at the same time, contributing to an increase in the world garbage. Couple with consumer angst, and worthless consumer products, the situation could reach an economic fatigue point.
Isabel P. Ball
January 22, 2007
Quality has always means to me a certain standard for products, when consumers could get a long mileage of use, and before, quality was the hallmark of consumer products in America. As has been, the stamped seal of Made In USA was a guarantee of consumers’ satisfaction. Recalling how as a young girl in the Philippines our parents would insist that we buy nothing but parts with the USA seal stamped on it.
With time, that scenario has changed with globalization. Perceptively, quality, nowadays has taken a backseat to quick profits in America, and occurring with speed of soil erosion in a flooded river. The catalyst is the brainchild of world distribution marketing the birth of gargantuan WalMart store.
I first heard of Walmart open in my small university town of Fort Collins in mid-80s. Then, the community buzzed with excitement about availability of affordable products. Curiosity, more than anything, I stepped inside the store, and to my chagrin, I saw what I had initially thought about the chain store, a quality much lower than sold at the JC Penney, May D & F, Sears, Kmart, Montgomery Wards and other reputable store names, I used to shop at.
The initial visit was repeated in the 2000s, when the store in National City opened. Our shopping spree at the Mall and other outlets, before Walmart, stopped, altogether, as the conglomerate has turned into a one-stop-shop, selling clothes, groceries, nursery, electronics, pharmacy, tools, to just about anything an individual would need.
Walmart, an alternative store, apparently, has easily captured America’s consumer heart, raking in billions in profit, thereby, edging many other stores out of the competition landscape, or had somehow forced other stores to downsize to survive. As the buying power of many Americans slips, Walmart is becoming the most frequented shopping place for the mainstream, enticing even the quality-conscious middle class.
Not much of a shopper myself, and on a restrained budget, like many Americans, I would buy essentials at the Walmart. While I endure the sacrifices of patronizing the cheaper price products, noticeably, the quality is eroding, and seemingly becoming disproportionate to the price tags that had kept up with inflation.
In my recent shopping, a pack of underwear bearing a reputable brand, attractively colored and designed, however, belied poor quality in materials and workmanship from Mexico. Sizes starkly differed, as though the materials were overstretched, and the elastic were like a rubber band that has reached its elasticity point. As I was stymied by an earlier return of a wrong-size pack of underwear, I decided to keep the hipsters for validation. Soon, I was able to prove a fact that the eyes are still the best means by which to judge the physical quality of a product. Discards the pack of hipsters had become, and so was my hard earned moolah into the trash. Similarly, the socks I bought containing many pieces in a pack, were also of low quality. A one color, fit-many-sizes pack was a disappointing buy. They fit loosely in my size 7-foot. Cumbersome and irritating, they rotate about inside the shoes; the heels and toes ending on wrong sides of the foot.
On that shopping day, I sort of splurged myself, and picked up a handy cassette player, of an unknown brand, selling truly inexpensively, and was irresistible. In addition, a boom box with cassette, CD, radio features, also of unknown brand, I bought for its looks to replace the still functioning, but bulky Sony stereo. These electronics, however, all lay in my room, unused for lack of the expected quality in sound and performance. You would say perhaps that price always has its weight on quality. To which I’d debate that poor quality products should have no place on any stores. If these products fail to satisfy the consumer, then, the sensible act is to ban them from production, avoid related waste.
Walmart is a store riddled with controversies. It has been alleged to employ cheap labor, and illegal employees in its roster. These, and the degraded quality of products imported mainly from China and Mexico, to mention a few, are the sources of the store’s strength in the business.
The community is saving, price wise, indeed. But something that America seems to be ignoring is the equation of quality to the price. What good are the cheap priced products if consumers are not satisfied with them? In the short and long term, realization might dawn that all these price wars add nothing to consumers’ prosperity, instead only creating few more billionaires in the midst of an impoverished citizenry, at the same time, contributing to an increase in the world garbage. Couple with consumer angst, and worthless consumer products, the situation could reach an economic fatigue point.