Small organizations that had a customer focus are being out-competed by cut throat organizations that put more money in marketing and less money in service. In that predatory system, shareholder is king, customer is prey.
30 years ago when I was a team leader for a small group in a hospital the junior leadership had a meeting with the VP of the hospital. He explained that there’s a calculation to be made where money could be spent on lawyers or quality of care and that there needs to be a balance. In other words, balance the financial outcome of being sued for quality issues vs spending on quality in the first place. Certainly there are diminishing returns and no organization can ever meet 100% quality, so it’s not wrong, but it was just shocking to hear that it’s a cold financial calculation. But that is reality. If you don’t cut corners where you can, you may end up out of business when your competition can do the same thing for less – sure maybe the quality isn’t as good but marketing can more than make up for it.
Businesses are there to maximize profit – low cost labor, cheap parts, inflated pricing, unnecessary add-ons, commission for service writers. That’s just reality. Or you could go to a small independent repair shop that has a reputation to uphold, no fancy marketing department, just honest work, but they are getting harder and harder to find, and even organizations like that may need to start cutting corners just to make ends meet.
Similarly if you’re a front line worker that’s being paid based on how much work you do, you’ll rush everything. Time is money. You’re trying to feed your family and make the rent, and management might be measuring your productivity and if you’re not hustling you could be shown the door. It’s just not simply that nobody cares, or people are lazy. It’s been long said that you can have things cheap, fast, or quality – choose two.
There’s a reason why many businesses have high labor turnover – workers are being pressured into doing things that may not be ethical and they will leave when they can, or for better pay once they have some experience under their belt. It’s just supply and demand. Like anything else, quality labor isn’t cheap and cheap labor isn’t quality. If you want to run a business on cheap labor chances are you’ll have high turnover, but if you run a business on quality labor you might lose your business to the guy next door who charges less and uses underpaid and overworked unqualified people off the streets.
That’s why I strongly recommend that if you are physically able to, then learn to do things yourself where you can. That way you’ll know it was done right. For those who want to learn how to do simple maintenance themselves others here are more than willing to give guidance. It’s often cheaper to buy the equipment/tools to do something yourself then paying for the labor to do something even if it’s only a 15 minute job.
Yes everyone performing a service should do it competently, cheaply, and quickly, but that’s in the ideal world, not the one we live in. There are great dealerships but more and more dealerships are being bought out by large dealership groups where profit is the only thing they care about. They budget for more lawyers and marketing than quality because it’s more profitable.
Even brands that we used to trust are now having their stuff made in China to low quality standards – as much as I dislike them doing this, I understand that they’re under pressure from competition that’s getting stuff made cheap in China – or sometimes a brand is bought out by a private equity group that wants to boost profits in the short term to extract wealth. It’s just not a simple good vs evil situation. It’s market forces at wor
