What is it about Chinese goods?
I was going to say “Chinese manufacturing”, but in my experience there are plenty of products conceived in the US (or Canada, or Europe), produced in China that are perfectly fine from a quality standpoint. Clearly, there’s nothing wrong with Chinese manufacturing as such.
But when it comes to products and goods “designed” in China, things really fall apart—often quite literally. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if it’s tools, electronics, household goods, toys, food, even cars: what superficially looks like a decent product often turns out to be shoddy, even downright unsafe. I use “design” in quotes because as often as not, the Chinese product is a knockoff of a well-designed, well-made genuine article produced by another company.
You’d think that if they’re copying an existing product they could at least manage to replicate that product’s quality, but perplexingly that’s also rarely the case. Sure, it may cost more than the $20 or so my friend paid for the “Lolex” (as we jokingly call it) watch he brought me back from his China trip, to produce a real Rolex watch, but it doesn’t cost the thousands that the real thing is priced at, either. You’d expect to find quality knockoffs filling that middle ground, but you simply don’t. It’s as if they had one or two tries at duplicating the real thing, stopped trying, and started producing the result en masse.
To say nothing of the various fake/tainted food scandals that have plagued the country in recent years. What kind of mindset does it take to put inedible or sometimes toxic ingredients into food products and assume that no-one will be able to tell the difference? The mind boggles.
Is it a cultural thing?
Are inadequate laws and regulations and/or inadequate oversight to blame, or is there something else at play here? Here in the US, the FDA vigilantly monitors food and drug production… but food inadvertently tainted by pathogens still manage to make it to the consumer on a fairly frequent basis, proving the FDA and other regulators aren’t all-seeing and all-knowing, either. Accidental, even occasionally negligent tainting of products still happen, but what you don’t see is deliberate introduction of non-food ingredients into food products as is apparently often the case in China.
It really makes me wonder, what motivates the perpetrators? What mentality does it take to make a product that they know may be harmful to others? As far as I know, farmers and food producers in China are not desperately poor. Sure, no doubt many face dire financial straits, but the same could be said of farmers here and elsewhere. Greed? That’s an easy accusation to make, but again, there are greedy people everywhere.
I think it’s more to do with the population and the sociopolitical regime. In a country with over a billion people, a government without any accountability to its citizens who are given no voice, everybody becomes depersonalized, disconnected. The loss of accountability isn’t just between the government and the average citizen, it also occurs between people: if other people are reduced to nothing but a faceless set of numbers, the individual producer doesn’t feel personally accountable to whomever his product may ultimately reach.
Culture is a two-way road, of course: part of the reason the Chinese (and others) make cheap, shoddy goods is that people seem to be content to buy them. Almost everything we buy is regarded as “disposable”; infusing technology into many products somehow infuses with them with built-in obsolescence.
My parents bought many household appliances that served them for twenty, thirty or more years. I’m not that optimistic about my $10 toaster, nor any of the other appliances in my home. Sure, they’re cheap and easily replaced, but I have a feeling what they lack in longevity will ultimately result in a higher amortized price.
On one hand, I wouldn’t want a computer built to last longer than, say, five years; on the other, I wouldn’t mind paying more for a toaster that works well and lasts decades. The balance to be struck, I think, lies in doing one thing, and doing it well. Adding on techy features on to a product to “add value” will in the long run do the opposite. I don’t want my toaster to play music; I don’t need my fridge to surf the Web or play DVDs.
Stretching Your Dollars
Written by vtluu on November 25th, 2008Like many people I try to remember to pick up a few non-perishable food items to drop into the food bank donation bin on my way out of the supermarket, especially ’round this time of year. Upon further reflection it occurred to me that such an act, while commendable, is a bit of a symbolic gesture. Sure, if everybody gave a few items of food, then the amount collected might be enough, but of course not everybody does, and in reality not everybody could, if only because it would overwhelm the food bank’s logistical capabilities: a mountain of randomly-donated food would take far too much effort and expense to sort and transport.
That got me thinking about efficiency and scale. The amount I donate to some other charities would buy a pallet or more of food at wholesale prices. Nobody collects cans of soup and boxes of cereal to send to the hungry in impoverished nations across the globe, because as they’ve long ago figured out, it would be monumentally inefficient. Instead, people donate money, which can be collected and moved with very little overhead cost, and the money gets used to purchase food in bulk in a way that it can be quickly and cost-effectively delivered to those who need it. So what makes us think that dropping cans into a bin on the way out of the grocery store is a good idea?
Maybe it’s a sense of directness: we may find it emotionally rewarding to think that an item of food has gone from our hands into those of a needy family. It’s the next best thing to volunteering at a food bank or soup kitchen and feeding people directly, which many of us are unable or—let’s face it—unwilling to do. Rationally speaking, however, there’s no arguing with the fact that money talks.
'Fake' shopping list from Second Harvest of Santa Clara's Virtual Food Drive website
To that end I decided that rather than trying to remember to get food for the donation bin, I’d donate money directly to the food bank. Sure, throwing money may be the “easy” way out, but in this case it’s easiest for me and easiest for the food bank and ultimately for the people it serves, so everybody comes out on the winning end… Except maybe the supermarket, who’s lost a few pennies’ worth of profit on the items that I didn’t buy for the donation bin.
My local food bank—Second Harvest of Santa Clara—has a “virtual food drive” site set up to receive online monetary donations. The “Virtual Food Drive” shopping page is fake—you don’t really choose what items to donate, your money just goes into a pool that’s used to purchase needed items, which makes much more sense anyway—and some of the “Our Price” vs. “Retail Price” numbers are a bit dubious, but nevertheless the economies of scale and the above arguments still apply. Wherever you are, find your local food bank and contribute however you can—it’s that much more important in these tough times.
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Tags: Charity, Donations, Food Drive