Cheap goods will always cost people more in the long run

By Lethbridge Herald on March 4, 2025.

Editor,

There are ten houses on the south side of our street. Eight of them have a two-car garage.  Only two of them are used for cars. The rest are storage space for tools but mostly for junk that eventually end up in landfill site

People have too many clothes which are still in good condition but are not worn. Me too. They are donated to charities or thrown out. So “Value Village” is a profitable business not a charity. 

It’s all because clothes are cheap, made mostly in countries where labor is cheap. We buy too many more things and throw away a lot of them without feeling guilt. It’s because they are cheap.

Consequently waste management is an increasingly serious challenge for municipal governments. We are producing so much garbage by buying too many things that are cheap. So we can throw them out without guilt. The planet earth has only limited capacity to absorb so much garbage. They rot and become toxic, killing animals and plants.

I blame the widely accepted view that finding a bargain is sensible and morally positive behavior. We have to realize that it’s not always so.  Cheap is the opposite of good quality. It can be a means to deceive and exploit. As I age and become more fussy about food, I can taste the difference between a name brand and a no-name brand of the same food item.

It’s easy to tell why one is cheaper but not as tasty as the other. I feel cheated and insulted because it’s bad food. Producers of no-name brands are not losing money. They make good profit selling cheaper products.  I can hear “The poor have no right to enjoy good food.”

In Japan there is a saying “Yasu karow, Waru karow” meaning “The cheaper, the worse.” But in Canada people check the price first then the quality. My mother came to Canada from Japan in her ripe old age. She always checked the quality of merchandise first. She never got used to checking the price first despite her fixed income. I had a few battles in stores with my Mom, because she didn’t choose a cheaper brand. However, once she bought more expensive clothes and trinkets, she wore them for a long time.

A Swedish coworker told me that in Sweden people bought cars expecting to drive them for a lifetime. Could that be the reason why very few American cars are on the road in Europe? That can explain how the take-over of the North American automobile market by German and Japanese car makers happened only in a few decades. It’s because people became more conscious of longevity when it comes to high priced items like automobiles. It was not the cheaper price that swayed buyers. It was good quality hence the longevity of cars that did it. Good quality makes high-priced items last longer hence worth the money. 

My brother-in-law is a retired adjuster of the Manitoba public auto-insurance. He pointed out the inferior quality as the main reason for the demise of the North American automobiles. He thinks that the dictum “the cheaper, the better” is rejected by the market. Only Ford Motors switched emphasis to quality thus withstood the onslaught of German and Japanese imports.

Cheap stuff does not necessarily help the people with modest incomes. Of course I don’t want to pay more. I admire frugality. What I am against is selling inferior quality products cheaply just because they sell more with more profit.  I smell deception.

What I am against is an exploitation of the hard working people by selling them cheaper but inferior products for profit. Cheaper products are often short in quality. So they do not last as long as quality products.

This is how poor people end up buying more and paying more. This is how the lower-income people end up paying more than the rich. When you are rich, you save more money because you buy less in number but owing the higher quality that last longer.  When you have smaller disposable income, life costs more because you have to buy more. I don’t think that’s right.

Everyone knows that many high-end cars come with lifetime warranty. I have known people who owned Cadillac, Mercedes, Lexus, and Volvo.  All of them said to me one time or another how reasonable it is to own high-end cars. It’s because of the low cost of  maintenance. But how many of us can afford the initial expenditure? So rich people end up paying less.

Let’s think of the quality first.  Remember the cheaper is often worse. A little bit more expensive items can be less costly in the end. So mind the quality

Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui

Lethbridge.