Opus 2026-421: The Problem with Quality

I just took the plunge and bought a couple of books on Amazon.  They look nice in the pictures and when I got them that was an accurate depiction of what they were.  What didn’t come through online was that the covers, although technically hardbound, we’re made up of that shiny plastic coating on the outside rather than the old cloth bound covers.  Short term, it won’t make any difference.  Long-term I have a question on whether these books will hold up.  Since both of them will be what I consider reference books I need something that will hold up over use.  A novel or a one time cultural criticism can fall apart and it’s not the end of the world.  When you have something that you need for reference that should endure.  I guess I should be glad I won’t live long enough for them to disintegrate.  

I don’t know that there are any options.  In the old days, you could go to a bookstore and handle the merchandise so that you knew what you were getting quality-wise.  If had been able to do that I might have thought twice about buying them.  I would’ve looked a little further, hoping to find better quality, even if it cost a little more.  Here’s where our current market atmosphere is driving quality out of the stores.

If I have two items to buy, and the price is different, but the price reflects the quality, I am free to make the choice of whether I want to pay the extra money.  I have no problem paying for quality.  What I have a problem with is paying the quality price for the inferior product.  Let’s take a simple pencil.  When I was teaching, it became obvious that pencils came in different qualities.  You could go down to the back-to-school sale at Walmart and buy a package of pencils for a nickel apiece.  They looked nice.  They were well packaged.  You were happy with your purchase.  You totally ignored the Ticonderoga brand which is right beside them and cost much more.

Fast-forward to the classroom.  I always insisted on having a good, solid pencil sharpener fastened the wall.  I would watch kids take their shiny new pencils up to the pencil sharpener, inserted in the proper hole, and start cranking.  I would watch their nice new full-length pencil slowly be reduced to a stub because the quality of the pencil was so low that it was impossible to get a point.  It could be cheap materials.  It could be the fact that the lead was not centered in the wood.  It could also be the technique of the child.  I also noticed that occasional student who had the expensive pencil could walk up, crank the handle a few times, and walk away with a nice point on his still long pencil.  The quality was worth it if you were planning on doing much work with a pencil.

What do you do when the local merchant, or the mail order merchant for that matter, only makes the cheap pencils available?  Maybe learn to write with a pen.

homo unius libri