It's festive season for the billion Indians. A season to celebrate with new clothes and fresh furnishing for homes. Now, this is a great opportunity for sellers to lure in customers. As the trends are changing, we find ourselves peering into the little windows of mobiles and other gadgets to find us the best buy, a better discount and the perfect gift.
Window shopping has finally transformed. And some other things have changed too. The window sizes have gotten smaller and digital. Thanks to all the efforts into miniaturization, and the globalization, we have the world markets at our hands. Eager sellers are throwing offers upon offers to get us interested into their virtual shops. The trend of unbelievable discounts does not stop at online stores, it extends to the sale seasons too. Why are the prices dropped so much? Do we really pay three times the actual prices? Am I being robbed?!
I wondered for a while about this. Previously I thought we are moving from a repair, maintenance and commitment culture to a replace and don't bother culture. This makes me sad in some ways. I just gave my trekking shoes for repair. The company I bought it from promises a lifetime service. This makes sense to me, because I had to wear my shoes down till they fit me well and I got used to them. This is a relationship for me, I would hesitate to move to a new pair of shoes. The comfort level is just not the same. Same is true with a well worn pair of jeans. Under what circumstance should I replace something? Time and again we have been reminded of the "don't fix if it ain't broken" law. Is there a don't replace if it works fine law? There should be. But the market compels us to do otherwise. Own more than you need and throw just because it is old. Mostly true with electrical and electronics appliances, this trend makes sense if we think of how we made things smaller. Most of the appliances we buy have a US or, now increasingly, a Chinese brand name. They are manufactured in the developing countries, and that is not India. The electronics incorporated are miniaturized. Instead of being able to replace a little burnt resistor, now a whole board would be replaced. The board unfortunately is not available locally. The import charges far exceed the cost of the board. The local production is also not an option. So, the solution is to just replace the entire machine. At exchange deals, the spare, I am hoping comes back into circulation. The other alternative is that the spare is just thrown in the dump, producing lot of electronic waste, which is terrible for the environment, mostly us, because it has lead and other poisonous chemicals that can seep into our water and soil and such resources.
Another reason to replace is, the number of design engineers and development engineers and such roles created. The production paradigm has shifted from a constant and stable production line, to an innovation, competition driven system. The innovation could be in design, control software and so on. The focus is on having a good production chain that is changed every sprint, cycle or whatever the company calls it internally. There are no such maintenance positions anymore. To keep up with changing products, a maintenance engineer would have to be always under training. So, maintenance is not for the regular people, it is for big corporations that can afford a maintenance contract. So, we the regular people are forced to replace old-ish technology with a slightly newer version, which in most cases may not perform as well as the old. I would love to quote the degraded performance of new version of an operating system here, but I am sure a hint is sufficient to know what I am talking about.
The effect of this culture is never seen when everything is running well, may not be smooth, but running nonetheless. Once the gadget fails, the cost and the talk with the customer care is just unacceptable. It almost seems like the customer care centers are given a standard script of what our problems should be and even those are not to tackled well. How is it, that a reputed company can have such poor customer care? Slapped onto you is the fact that, if you are not buying something from them, then you are wasting their time. And for this, I need to repeat my contact information and such, that the company already had collected during the purchase. Has it lost the will to loyally serve existing customers? Imagine this happens with your bank account. "Sorry madam! We seem to have lost your record and your money, we don't know why your account number does not come up when you log in to our website. Would you mind restarting the entire business with a new and improved account? For the inconvenience caused, we will assign a personal manager who will hackle you to get new loans." Oh! Wait. That already is happening.
I don't want new trends, I don't want new things to replace things that work well anyways. I want to be able to pay the price that the product actually is worth. Why is it that everyone seems OK with being cheated like this?
Could be the attractive, may have no use in my life, discount on something I don't need, that keeps me excited and buying.
This I know, I can't replace the time wasted on the pointless sale. So, not shopping, this festive season, unless I need something, and not because it looks good.
I do agree with most of what you are saying. We do tend to buy stuff that we don't need just because they look attractive or because there is a sale. There are a couple of points however:
ReplyDeleteWe can have a culture in which the old items (which are usually thrown) can be passed on to people who would never be able to afford them. As you said, in many cases these items are in working condition and so it should not be a problem to pass on. I would strongly recommend a culture such as this.
In case we are considering clothes, shoes (and similar items), then I can understand that we can continue with products for years and obtain satisfactory service from them. However I am not sure this applies to electronics, which has just seem to exploded. New products have so many different features compared to old ones, that people are forced to consider purchasing them. Consider smart phones. When we began our PhDs, I don't think too many people had smart phones. Then the demand just skyrocketed (probably due to attractive offers :P) and so people who had working phones considered and did purchase new ones. I don't know how to deal with this phenomenon.