They don’t make them as they used to is a saying familiar everywhere, not just in our country, which clearly shows there is some truth in it. Clothes, as well as many other products, are notoriously overpriced and the quality in many cases does not justify the price. Still, you often hear people say they are not rich enough to buy cheap stuff. Customers definitely recognize that quality is an important attribute in products and services. But it seems that the so-called quality gap is constantly diminishing partly due to the outsourcing of manufacture to the Far Eastern countries and the internationalization of trade and competition, while the price gap remains. The bottom line is, people want quality but they do not want to pay too high a price.
The Japanese had a quality system that allowed them to produce better products than their US and European rivals, but the ironic part of the story was that they learned this quality system from the US experts. Namely, after the World War II, Japan decided to make quality improvement a national imperative as a part of rebuilding their economy and asked some American experts for help. By implementing American ideas in their management policies and manufacturing processes, Japanese companies soon came to dominate the world market. They have contributed a number of successful quality methods recently adopted by Western companies, the best known among them being TQM (Total Quality Management) which requires that a company ensures its quality standards in all aspects of its business, not just the production. Although TQM as well as some other Japanese methods went out of fashion in the late 1990s, the core ideas behind them are still very valuable.
