Peter's Blog

One of our relatives recently bought a plastic play torch for our daughter as one of her Christmas presents. My daughter only played with the torch for less than a week when it suddenly stopped working. In order to find out what the issue could be, I opened up the top with a screwdriver and found that the spring that pushes the batteries up to the contact in the light bulb had become stuck. The product had been made in the Far East probably very cheaply and my relative had paid about eight pounds (GBP) for it.

I ask you now, "Has our society gone so far as to produce goods as cheaply as possible, only to bin what we have just bought and replace things shortly afterwards with something new  - so that we have the latest, up-to-date products and so that our economy keeps on going, companies sell more products, increase their profits and investors and in particular shareholders multiply their wealth?".  

Is short term 'Greed' worth more than our future, our children and our children’s children, the state of the earth and what is surrounding us? It seems that short-term thinking is more popular than future-thinking and Norman Lear, the American television writer and producer goes straight to the point by saying “Short term thinking is the social disease of our time.”. 

Wouldn’t it be wiser to produce good quality products that last and for companies to increase revenue by INNOVATION rather than by producing cheaper and cheaper quality products? And wouldn’t it be better to price the products on how much they cost and what they are worth, even if they are more expensive and to justify this by highlighting the quality without producing masses of cheap products? 

To give you another example where quality is paramount, the car manufacturer Porsche, in their financial year 2007/2008, built approximately 100,000 cars in comparison to their competitors within the same quality league who produced approximately 1 million cars during the same time (see Porsche AG).   

If we seriously want to make a difference, every individual can. How? By being more conscious, looking more at the quality of products, doing more research on what we want to buy and by only buying good quality products, so leaving those ones that will fall apart behind. 

Our leaders and business owners also can take responsibility by producing and distributing good quality items. You may say that you have to produce cheap products to compete against the rest of the world but do you really? I leave you with that thought. 

Reducing staff during an economic downturn is, for some companies, an exercise they just have to go through. But how do these same companies know that they are keeping the right people, especially when some of them do not even know how to recruit properly in the first place?  

I have seen companies who make the people who earn the highest salary redundant to save on costs, but do they also consider what these people bring to their positions and what experience and knowledge they have that will be of benefit in later times? Can they afford to let these people go to the competition?

The media is talking day in, day out that we are heading towards a global recession. Companies are tightening their budgets and are watching where and on what they spend. When sales continue to drop over the next few months, budgets may be cut even further in certain areas. This might seem quite normal. However, I ask why are we not thinking more cleverly in “good economic times” where and on what we spend our money? Does an economic down turn need to happen for us to wake up and watch our spending more closely?