Value and Quality and Prices, Oh My

I'm trying to wrap my head around some ideas I've been reading about lately. Namely: does quality have to be prohibitively expensive? Are cheap goods inherently bad? And how do I apply any and all of this to running my own small business that sells high-quality candy? This is the first post that I hope will help everyone think this through.

Readers, I need your help.

Because we buy and sell on Etsy, we're attuned (hyper-attuned?) to discussions of price vs quality. I've also read a couple of books in that vein lately. The questions that are coming to my mind today are: are these books accurate? Did you get the same message I did from them?

First up: Cheap. The author argues that retail work in the late 1800s wasn't the trivialized low-wage version of today's retail jobs. As retailing moved from smaller mom-and-pop type stores to larger department stores and chain stores, more and more responsibility moved from being in the hands of people who were working on the floor, to people in corporate offices. People on the floor could no longer negotiate on price, or give a one-time discount, or see if they could order a version of the product that would better fit this particular customer's need. The standardization lowered costs, but it also lowered wages. Suddenly people needed the lower cost goods because it was all they could afford. Furthermore, as they were less exposed to actual responsibility, those jobs became less of a way to learn about how to run a store and more dead-end.

Next up: Shop Class as Soulcraft. It's about so much more than value and quality and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who is even slightly interested in making anything with their own hands. BUT, as it pertains to this blog post, it also says much the same thing about manufacturing: that as it got standardized, it also got dumb. People got treated more and more like machines and robots and less like people who could solve problems. But there's hope! There are people who value precision machinery and they need mechanics who can build and fix it - there will always be a need for someone to build and repair complex machines like cars and motorcycles. And they will be paid well because they have hard-to-learn skills that are useful to people who put a premium on high-quality machines.

Last up: the whole Slow Food movement. Producing quality food takes skill and can only be routinized so much. So quality ingredients and products are expensive and take time -- just like precision mechanics and (I would argue) high-quality retailing. One of Slow Food's basic principles is that people who grow good food need a good wage so they can also afford to buy it.

So: is there a commonality among these three things? Are the books correct, in your experience? Have I way oversimplified what they're trying to say? (Almost certainly.) What do you think? Do you have other examples?