Why have parts gotten worse while manufacturing tech has improved?

It just sort of hit me the other day to wonder why it is that the such a huge proportion of aftermarket replacement parts (stock or upgrade) are epically bad (don't fit, last a few weeks, etc) and that this apparent fall-off in quality has happened over the same period of time that the quality of a lot of cheap stuff (e.g. tools) has come way, WAY up.

Fit and finish on cheap imported tools is hugely better than it was 15-20 years ago. (isn't it? I am using my memory here, so...) So why is it that so many parts are so much worse than they used to be?

My impression is that manufacturing tech has improved a lot, and at this point the major manufacturing centers everywhere can hit more or less whatever quality target the commissioning party wants; better will be more expensive, sure, but we're not talking about paying Swiss watchmaker rates to get good results.

We've already discussed the race to the bottom and the difficulty of differentiating on anything other than price. My question is really about how with improved manufacturing technology, why isn't even the really cheap stuff better? Why is it worse than it used to be (I guess that same mfg tech being applied entirely to cost reduction?), and at some point does the return or even lawsuit rate ("I intend to show the jury beyond any doubt that this cannot in good faith be called an alternator") make it more profitable to have a floor on quality?

I answered this in a few other part quality related threads.  It's profit over product quality.  There is no other reason. 

I would guess that a lot of it has to do with the growth and prevalence of lean manufacturing practices.

As manufacturing tech gets better and better, you'd think that it would result in better quality for the same amount of effort, but for many organizations it just gives the lean guys a more granular ability to pull as much cost as humanly possible out of an assembly or component while maintaining the base level of functionality.

I'm not anti-lean, it's a reality of the modern manufacturing business and basically essential for American manufacturers to survive against China, but I sure learned a lot when I spent a couple years in the biz and was amazed at how obsessively teams can pull cost out of a part to hit the bare minimum requirements at the expense of overall quality.

I sell a very niche market pump and compete with another pump that was perfected in the late eighties and has not been modified or updated since. They came out with a new model but the old one is so entrenched that customers are reluctant to change. But, despite it being unchanged for forty years, it is widely acknowledged that it is no longer as reliable. It used to go 5 years between rebuilds and now it is only good for two to three years. What changed? All parts are UL listed and a rebuild kit will fit any pump made in the last forty years. Worn out tooling? Poorer quality control? Planned obsolescence to force acceptance of the new one? I don't know. 

It's all about the race to the bottom. It could be argued that the lack of any meaningful penalty for a poor quality manufacturer is also a factor - you can churn out cheap crap for a long time and Amazon/eBay will keep shoveling it out the door for you. Takes a lot of returns for the profit margin to be significantly affected. 

That all makes sense.

At the risk of using the wrong legal term, I believe that's also fraud ("misrepresentation" shows up in the definition), though I assume there's some sort of definition of failure rate wherein "a reasonable person" would say that taking money for one with the assertion that it's a functional part cannot be done in good faith.

It does dawn on me to wonder, though... why doesn't this apply to the cheap wrenches I was talking about up front? They got nicer, why didn't they just get cheaper instead?

Jesse Ransom said:

It does dawn on me to wonder, though... why doesn't this apply to the cheap wrenches I was talking about up front? They got nicer, why didn't they just get cheaper instead?

Advances in the relevant areas probably makes it just as cheap to make them "competitive". Better, cheaper automation. Broader customer market. Almost certainly a better quality of cheapo pig steel. Maybe even some survivor bias because the even cheaper option didn't survive or is on a hook at the fill up station or community draining dollar store. 

My take on that is - tools are bought more at leisure and quality can be seen by handling them. Parts are bought at need and quality is only really visible in hindsight. 

Tools also come down to volume. A factory can run a line pumping out 500,000 wrenches, label and sell half of those to premium brands like matco or mac, label some for harbor freight and sell the rest under unknown brands through amazon. 

I think the big difference in tools is that you just don't see that cheap chrome anymore :) There may be no improvement in quality, but they sure LOOK a lot better. 

dculberson said:

My take on that is - tools are bought more at leisure and quality can be seen by handling them. Parts are bought at need and quality is only really visible in hindsight. 

^This

The tools are being handled and used by the consumer. The (lack of) quality is apparent from the moment you start using them.

The cheap part is usually not installed by the consumer (customer) but by the mechanic. You can't tell the difference between a quality alternator/balljoint/etc in driving the car, the quality to the consumer is only realized once it fails again. 

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

I answered this in a few other part quality related threads.  It's profit over product quality.  There is no other reason. 

Surely consumer demand to get the cheapest possible price and willingness to accept loss of quality in pursuit of that has something to do with it.

What makes it even worse is that paying more doesn't necessarily have a correlation to higher quality. I can buy VW coilpacks from several suppliers with the same junk inside that last maybe a year at best. The pricing from about $120 to $250 for aftermarket and $350 for a dealer one. The ONLY one worth a crap is the dealer one EVEN if I get one from the OEM supplier in the aftermarket. May as well get cheap junk and roll the dice, or the money dealer stuff as those bounds are the only reliable ones.

Jesse Ransom said:

 My question is really about how with improved manufacturing technology, why isn't even the really cheap stuff better? Why is it worse than it used to be

What makes you think that manufacturing technology is significantly better today than it was 15-20 years ago (your reference point), and why do you think the the really cheap stuff isn't better, or at least not as good as it used to be?

You know how badly stuff is built now a days when they have to offer you an extended warranty for a mere 20% extra.

You would think the market would dictate better quality parts as the average age of cars is 12.1 years (the rise is likely due to the Coronavirus). When I raced a focus the parts were not better, the hub was still a weak point whether you got the ford, timken ect... Ford knew of the problem because they supported the race teams but never fixed it.The only real solution was getting custom made super hubs. On top of that some of the shelf hubs would show up damaged, or have some Chinese parts. The 3D printers I figured people skilled enough can start designing better parts and making a business on it. Sort of like a Bill Gates in his garage story, tinkering on the 3D printer.

I think it is a lot harder to hit this quality target you think can be easily accomplished. At the speed lines run, lack of oversight, and rarely is someone on site that really knows why things work the way they do. Even simple errors can make it the whole way through the system until there is are customer complaint. Everyone is trying to be the lowest cost by cutting the most corners. It is the American way, make things cheaper so everyone can have more junk. 

We run a very "simple" automated manufacturing process at work and can easily have issues that aren't caught until after the product makes it is out for delivery. I've had to throw away trailer loads of product because a seam of a bag wasn't strong enough for actual handling of the product. The side seam of our bag was strong enough to hold 40lbs of product and to be picked up by a machine and stacked in place but when an actual person went to handle the product in a not as delicate way it would break open spilling everywhere.  

In reply to trigun7469 :

That becomes limited to plastic parts for the most part. The added problem to that is you are still competing with overseas factories that barely pay their workers and produce in bulk. Shipping prices are going up, which might help things, but its still hard to compete. 

I have seen a story repeated in the automotive aftermarket over and over. Stateside company designs and produces a part. They do a good job of it, they charge $x. Someone buys that part and sends it to a factory in China. They reverse engineer the part, often shoddily, and produce it out of cheaper materials, with cheaper processes, with less quality control, in bulk. They do this without out the R&D costs, just the reverse engineering costs. That someone who sent it off to China, they are often stateside, then can sell the part for $ (x*0.75) and still have as good of (or better) profit margin than the stateside company that designed the part. Because its cheaper, it starts outselling the stateside company by a large factor and the stateside company cannot compete and is lucky to stay in business, despite producing a much better part from a quality/durability perspective.  

In reply to Duke :

You just read a lot of posts about how tech has improved.  Not only should this increase quality, it should also reduce cost.  Costs are lower today.  Greed is higher.  Greed is the driving force.  Deny all you want, all the cool kids are doing it.  
 

Also blaming the consumer is quite ironic in light of the last 3 years.  Australia's gov't started blaming the consumer last week....  one of their premiers did it during an interview.  You should watch it.  

It's just cost and profit.  Engineers can make very high quality items and produce them quickly and efficiently but the market probably won't pay for that. So the market will dictate the cost vs utility of an item. 
 

Look up the lion air report from the FAA. Instead of sending the angle of attack sensor to the OEM for repair or developing their own repair capabilities ( most major us airlines have this) they decided to go with a cut rate shop in Florida that hosed up the zero due to using a non equivalent gauge that the faa did deem as equivalent.   So save money. Get 0 offset by 10 degrees. Which shows up MCAS and tradgedy. 
 

not that I'm bitter about any of it all. 
 

The problem with aftermarket spare parts are that they are often produced by some company other than the one that made the parts for the vehicle while it was in production. I worked in a variety of parts plants making production run parts. We absolutely hated getting spare parts orders from the OEMs for vehicles that were no longer in production. They were disruptive to regular production, and they were money losers without exception. We always attempted to get the OEMs to do a "one time by" of parts and inventory them themselves when a model ended, but that rarely worked because they didn't want to sit on the inventory for years . We were usually obligated to supply spares for a model for ten years after production ended, but would have gleefully given up all spare parts sales  if we had the choice, and when the ten years was up we just said "No".

AnthonyGS (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to Duke :

You just read a lot of posts about how tech has improved.  Not only should this increase quality, it should also reduce cost.  Costs are lower today.  Greed is higher.  Greed is the driving force.  Deny all you want, all the cool kids are doing it. 

Also blaming the consumer is quite ironic in light of the last 3 years.  Australia's gov't started blaming the consumer last week....  one of their premiers did it during an interview.  You should watch it.  

You should read Apexcarver's post immediately above your response to mine.

[edit]  Here's the really relevant bit (emphasis mie):

Apexcarver said:

That someone who sent it off to China, they are often stateside, then can sell the part for $ (x*0.75) and still have as good of (or better) profit margin than the stateside company that designed the part. Because its cheaper, it starts outselling the stateside company by a large factor and the stateside company cannot compete and is lucky to stay in business, despite producing a much better part from a quality/durability perspective.  

Don't want cheap E36 M3?  Convince consumers to stop buying cheap E36 M3. But every bit as much as you insist that corporate greed is driving this, it is also driven by greedy consumers demanding the lowest price they can get, without regard to how it gets that low.

And then, Joe Consumer is dumbfounded that all they can find is cheap E36 M3, and they start bitching about how capitalist greed means that they can only get cheap E36 M3 anymore.

Wal*mart isn't the largest retail chain in the world because people don't want to shop at Wal*mart.  They exist because people want to buy cheap E36 M3 and Wal*mart meets that demand.

Keith Tanner said:

It's all about the race to the bottom. It could be argued that the lack of any meaningful penalty for a poor quality manufacturer is also a factor - you can churn out cheap crap for a long time and Amazon/eBay will keep shoveling it out the door for you. Takes a lot of returns for the profit margin to be significantly affected. 

Hear Hear.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cheap-tools-race-bottom-brian-bassett/

In reply to DeadSkunk (Warren) :

I worked in that industry for most of my career, and service parts was always a PIA. One of the companies I worked for determined that it was more economical to produce more parts than required for the order and set aside the leftovers for service.

Regarding advanced manufacturing tech, which I don't think has changed all that much in the last couple decades, it's usually not for better quality, but increased production. And, FWIW, I've actually seen managers pull parts out of scrap bins to make an order