Quality Cheaper Better

Quality cannot be defined absolutely in terms of price, although a more expensive product might look better quality their is no guarantee that the quality really is any different to a cheaper product. Which we all know, great, it's good to know that we all understand the same things, but I would like to explore the idea in terms of some of my own experience, or maybe it is just that I feel a need to talk about my old motorcycle.  
When you buy something new and you are past that initial stage when there might be a need for a few adjustments, the reliability for that product should level out and, if you maintain it well, it should remain reliable for some reasonable amount of time before the effects of wear starts to make themselves known. If the product is something fairly simple, like a shirt, you might at that point decide to throw it away or turn it into dusters, but if it is more complex do you get it repaired or replaced? Which decision contains the most quality and which decision will minimise your outlays in terms of money or time? Saving money or time can be a kind of quality, if you are able to use what you save successfully, although this can be almost impossible to define as we cannot really be sure how our life would have progressed if we had made a different choice.  
Imagine we have a car and after a few years we have to decide whether to replace it or keep it and spend increasingly more time and money in maintaining it. If we use the car for business then changing it is likely to be the best choice as time and money spent on repairs should be more effectively spent on making more money. If the car is used merely for pleasure then keeping the car could be an investment in experience. 
If we have a car that we need for work and something goes wrong with it - we know that garages repair cars, but do we really know how to get the best out of them? How to make the kind of requests, at the optimal time to get the kind of service that we desire? If instead we work in any service industry and come face to face with customers we quickly see that many of them fail to get the best out of us and what our company offers, and how easy it is to blame them, to think of them as being stupid or foolish. What, though, if the real problem was that neither side really understands what is happening when customer and customer service meet, both throwing away quality by a reluctance to learn?  
Learning takes much more effort than blaming someone else, and learning will never occur if we continue to block it. In the customer service position, we have to ensure that what we present the customer is understandable in the same way the way you file customer information has to be understood without thinking by the other people you work with. You know that feeling when you start work in a new job - everything is different, it is confusing and not a little alien. Well, that is often how we make the customer feel when they meet us for the first time, it is not enough that we understand the logic and apparent necessities of what we do, they have to be transparent to other people, to them. We need to spend time approaching other customer service departments to re-affirm within us what it feels like to deal with that unfeeling expert that we can so easily and unconsciously become. 
I once bought a very dead, 15 year old Honda step-thru motorcycle with broken plastic components and exhaust, disintegrated seat and nothing to kick the engine over with. It cost me about fifteen pounds, more than most people thought it was worth - but it was instantly available and it allowed me to get to know the person responsible for the student blocks I wished to move into while at university. 
Buying things like this helped me to realise that a successful personal sale was also an opportunity to get rid of things that I did not want that would feel like bonuses to the buyer. The actual sale was only part of the interaction, the change in my circumstances that the process of the sale brought about were often of more significance. I now possessed a motorcycle that was going to significantly expand my horizons, I was going to get a room where I wanted to be and my ability to take risks was to be confirmed with all who knew me. There were some who thought I was mad, but I was not paying them any attention.  
Let's say that you had a car that you wished to sell. The traditional business view, and peasant's view, is that you go through the car with a fine-tooth comb and remove anything of any possible value to maximise potential secondary sales (or to minimise value for the purchaser, if you are a peasant). There is nothing wrong with that, if you can successfully dispose of what you find without negatively influencing the rest of your life. Most people keep too many things for too long without generating a system for the effective disposal of these items. 
The longer you keep something, the less desirable it becomes in terms of condition, and longer it consumes storage resources that reduce the quality of the rest of your life. If you keep something so long that it comes into vogue again, the basic storage costs to your life is more than likely to counter the financial gain. Before selling the car it does make sense to look through it in case we have left something we need under the seat - and I do not mean something 'we could use'. Next we look in the garage and see what we do not want - maybe that old footpump could be put in a clear bag and placed in the car as a surprise for the purchaser. Hide anything valuable, position anything you do not want near the front of the garage and leave the garage doors open at some stage. You are selling a car after all, a car a purchaser could fill with some of your unwanted goods. Which could you sell, and which could you offer for free simply to engage the quality of freed up space? It is this understanding of the qualities of time, money and resources that can put anyone ahead of other people in a similar position. 
I know many translation companies where the managers are recruited from translators, and these managers continue to translate to make more money for themselves under the banner of 'reducing overheads'. This tells us that there is either not a requirement for a manager, or that the opportunities that focussing on managing should achieve are simply not being achieved. Perhaps this is partly due to a lack of training, where the managers are not able to fully develop the potential in their position through not being able to imagine the potential or having the skills to do so. We are all guilty of putting duties and pleasures before the task of assessing whether we are getting the most out of our life, and often the invisible costs of what we have not been able to do are not balanced by the profits of the things we actually do.  
Motorcycles were not things that I was so familiar with, but this little Honda was stripped down to its essentials and then stared at. Conventional wisdom said that if I wanted to have a bike that I could ride both on and off the road, I should have bought a bike designed for that purpose. If I had done so, I most likely would have repaired it, ridden it and then moved onto other bikes or activities, and my level of wisdom and reputation would have remained at the conventional level. I looked at some books about off-road motorcycling, I stared at some bikes at the local motorcycle agent's and then I thought, drew things, made lists. I then cut, welded, sewed and, yes, tied things on with string and elastic straps before riding it around a local wood. It was fun to ride for an hour but, even forgetting the need to tie things back on every ten minutes, it was hardly a good bike. The riding made me think some more and over the next few months the bike evolved into a street legal, lightweight, high-performance 6 horsepower machine.  
Eventually we packed the bike in the back of a van, along with my brother's and my friend's bikes and drove all the way down to the Alps. Once there I was on my own in terms of resources to support a shaky development bike, and when it broke down for the countless-th time half way up a mountain road with a mystery electrical fault, I knew it was time for some one-on-one communing with my machine. I waved goodbye to my brother and my friend and proceeded to remove every single wire from the machine, rolling each up and placing them neatly in a row. Brain-wire-bike. 
If I wanted lunch, I was going to have to get off this mountain, and my bike was the only route I was going to consider. Aside from those limitations, I opened myself up to what was possible, not what had been done before on this or any other machine in the known world. From first principles I produced a simple wiring system for the bike, one that worked, and which would continue to work reliably for the rest of the bike's life. The solution was achieved not in the comfort of a workshop with an expert on call, but from within, using the minimum of tools. We all know more than we realise, because we learn everyday about what we like and what we do not like, what works and what limps along. 
Working at a customer service point or as a branch manager we can often succeed without employing external resources by doing nothing more than becoming more familiar with how our own experience, and those of the people around us, can be applied to improve the way we work. One achievement builds confidence to look for the next, where failure becomes nothing more than a delay, an opportunity to consider a different solution. Living with our systems, rather than living with our head turned away from them, is one of the best ways of learning to understand it. Solutions come by tinkering and testing, looking for parallels in other industries, in other people's garages.