Passage 1
The term “quality” is one of the most misused in the business world. What exactly does it mean? Our grandparents would have been in no doubt. Quality meant excellence: a thing was the best of its kind, and that was that. In business, however, the word has acquired a very different meaning: consistency, a lack of defects.
Around 1970, it is said, a group of investment analysts visited a world-famous UK engineering company. They asked the questions of their trade: about profit margins, stock control and balance sheets. The company’s executives did not see the point of all this. Their products were the finest in the world. Why all these detailed questions about numbers?
Rolls Royce, the company in question, duly went bust in 1973. The trouble with old-style quality was that it encouraged supply-driven management. The engineers would make the product to the highest possible standard and price it accordingly. If the public was so uncultured that they turned it down, so much the worse for the public. It was all very well for artists to produce masterpieces. The job of companies was to please the market.
Quality has a third meaning: that of value for money. To qualify for that meaning, a product must be of certain standard; and it should convey a sense, not of outright cheapness, but of being sold at a fair price.
The US fast foods group McDonald’s, for instance, talks of its ‘high quality food’. But at 99c or 99p, its hamburgers are as close to absolute cheapness as any person in the developed world could desire. They are also highly consistent. Eat a McDonald’s anywhere around the world and the results will be roughly similar. But as anyone who has eaten a really good American hamburger knows, a McDonald’s is also a long way from quality in its original sense.
46.The writer thinks that McDonald’s hamburgers are not worth the money.