Let There Be Light
Wouldn't it be great if you bought stuff and it didn't turn out to be crap. And wouldn't it be even better if Christmas tree lights from last year occasionally fucking worked. I'm of the opinion that these two concepts are inextricably related - since retailers are all busy competing with each other to drive down price, the quality of the goods they sell is of secondary importance. (Who am I kidding? It's of no importance at all most of the time.) So the tree lights that were bought last year from K-Mart, and carefully stowed in a large plastic box at the end of the season, utterly failed to perform their, let's face it, pretty limited task when Mrs Bison plugged them in on Sunday.
To add insult to injury, some of the lights on some strings worked, but I'm buggered if I could figure out what to do to make the rest come on. Sure, I tried replacing fuses, changing out bulbs and straightening wires, and then, when that didn't work, I resorted to shaking the fucking things and banging them on the floor, but without any success. Mrs Bison ended up going back to K-Mart and buying a whole load more crappy lights. Next year we'll pull them out of the box again, and next year they'll be fucked again. I guarantee it.
How hard can it be? Tree lights are just some wire, some bulbs and a plug. They are a borderline fire hazard on a good day, but it's not like they have a sophisticated task to perform. You can buy a mobile phone or game system with millions of sensitive microscopic connections etched on tiny silicon wafers, and they'll continue to do their job for years, even if you drop them in the bog. And that job involves complex tasks, like communicating with people in different continents. We have plasma TVs, mobile GPS systems, MP3 players, Nintendo Wii and noise canceling headphones. So why the fuck, after half a century of experience, can manufacturers not figure out how to make a string of bulbs on a wire work?
Tree lights are all made in China, obviously in the factories which specialize in lead-lined children's toys and contaminated milk. The Chinese can produce goods of very high quality if necessary, so who specified the lights to be made "as shit as possible"? It must be K-Mart, right? They know what they're buying. Now, you might ask why I don't buy more expensive lights, in the expectation that they'd last longer. I learned my "don't pay more" lesson years ago with tin openers.
Everyone knows that tin openers all corrode and, after a while, you can't get them to turn properly. So you go and buy another one. I figured out that if I bought a better model, with interlocking wheels and a more robust construction, it would last forever, and save me having to keep buying new ones. Guess what? It rusted up just as fast as the cheap ones. Rule Number One of the retail trade: paying more doesn't mean you get more. So if I buy more expensive tree lights I'll just end up throwing away more expensive-but-useless lights next year.
It's the same story with everything from shoes to clothes to furniture - it's not made to last. I'd be more than happy to pay extra for tree lights that I knew would work next year, but how would they be distinguishable at the store? A big label, saying "Guaranteed Not To Be Shit" or "Work For Ten Years Or Your Money Back"? I don't think so. So if you fully expect the stuff you buy to be crap, the only sensible response is to buy the cheapest crap so you waste as little money as possible. Which means that retailers will continually drive down the quality of what they sell, since it's expected to be crap, and needs to be cheap.
Mind you, it's always possible that Mrs Bison didn't pick up the "Never Work Twice" lights and instead selected the "Burn You Alive In Your Sleep" ones. In which case I won't have to worry about getting them out of the box next Christmas. Or buying a new tin opener either, for that matter...
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
To add insult to injury, some of the lights on some strings worked, but I'm buggered if I could figure out what to do to make the rest come on. Sure, I tried replacing fuses, changing out bulbs and straightening wires, and then, when that didn't work, I resorted to shaking the fucking things and banging them on the floor, but without any success. Mrs Bison ended up going back to K-Mart and buying a whole load more crappy lights. Next year we'll pull them out of the box again, and next year they'll be fucked again. I guarantee it.
How hard can it be? Tree lights are just some wire, some bulbs and a plug. They are a borderline fire hazard on a good day, but it's not like they have a sophisticated task to perform. You can buy a mobile phone or game system with millions of sensitive microscopic connections etched on tiny silicon wafers, and they'll continue to do their job for years, even if you drop them in the bog. And that job involves complex tasks, like communicating with people in different continents. We have plasma TVs, mobile GPS systems, MP3 players, Nintendo Wii and noise canceling headphones. So why the fuck, after half a century of experience, can manufacturers not figure out how to make a string of bulbs on a wire work?
Tree lights are all made in China, obviously in the factories which specialize in lead-lined children's toys and contaminated milk. The Chinese can produce goods of very high quality if necessary, so who specified the lights to be made "as shit as possible"? It must be K-Mart, right? They know what they're buying. Now, you might ask why I don't buy more expensive lights, in the expectation that they'd last longer. I learned my "don't pay more" lesson years ago with tin openers.
Everyone knows that tin openers all corrode and, after a while, you can't get them to turn properly. So you go and buy another one. I figured out that if I bought a better model, with interlocking wheels and a more robust construction, it would last forever, and save me having to keep buying new ones. Guess what? It rusted up just as fast as the cheap ones. Rule Number One of the retail trade: paying more doesn't mean you get more. So if I buy more expensive tree lights I'll just end up throwing away more expensive-but-useless lights next year.
It's the same story with everything from shoes to clothes to furniture - it's not made to last. I'd be more than happy to pay extra for tree lights that I knew would work next year, but how would they be distinguishable at the store? A big label, saying "Guaranteed Not To Be Shit" or "Work For Ten Years Or Your Money Back"? I don't think so. So if you fully expect the stuff you buy to be crap, the only sensible response is to buy the cheapest crap so you waste as little money as possible. Which means that retailers will continually drive down the quality of what they sell, since it's expected to be crap, and needs to be cheap.
Mind you, it's always possible that Mrs Bison didn't pick up the "Never Work Twice" lights and instead selected the "Burn You Alive In Your Sleep" ones. In which case I won't have to worry about getting them out of the box next Christmas. Or buying a new tin opener either, for that matter...
Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
6:56 PM
1 Comments:
Mrs Jaggy wanted the tree up on the 1st of December this year, which is practically still Halloween. I went through all the sets of lights before they were put on the tree to make sure they worked. 3 sets failed the test by either not working at all, or, annoyingly only having some of the lights work. And like yourself, I went through the routine of changing fuses and bulbs etc until the next step would have been to get the multimeter out and do some proper testing. Fuck that, 3 sets in the bin.
The remaining sets were put on the tree and it was decorated, lights were switched on, and lo and behold, another fucking set had stopped working. The only ones that have worked consistently from one year to the next were the sets of slightly more expensive LED lights that I bought over the last 2 years.
There's only one set of conventional bulb lights left now and I might as well just put them straight in the bin when the tree comes down as there's no fucking chance they'll last another year.
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